Advance Invoice & Other Accounting Features at a Glance

OpenERP is one of the best OpenSource ERPs. Financial management has never been so easy as you can type it, but its a hard task to be carried out with several critical and delicate details filed up carefully.
We would like to present How Advance Invoice Works in OpenERP ! See OpenERP Advance Invoice How-To Video for more clear details.

OpenERP Financial Management is getting improved each version and slowly proving to be usable by various Firms. We have witnessed the use of OpenERP Accounting in India at their clients’  workplaces. There are several salient features such as Invoice Control, Multi Currency possibilities, Easy reconciliation, Standard Reports, Followups, voucher management,etc.
You can record your operations in a few clicks and manage all your financial activities in one place.

Key Features(Courtesy : OpenERP)

	Smart User Interface   As an accountant, you need to be able to record a set of operations in just a few minutes.		Invoice Control  Get clear visibility of invoices awaiting from your supplier, control and validate them without re-encoding.
	Easy Payment Management   Reconcile invoices easily with payments through bank interfaces and check handling and printing.		Automate your Follow-Ups  Set-up and automate follow-ups to get a periodical financial overview and get paid quickly.
	Integrated Analytic accounting  Get your analytic accounting operations integrated with timesheets, projects, invoices, warehouse, etc.		Easy reconciliation  OpenERP helps you to easily reconcile invoices and payments using the manual approach or the automated wizard.
	Multi-Currency  Unlimited currencies supported with daily automatic updates of currency rates.		We support your country  We support: US, FR, IN, UK, ES, CH + 20 other countries
	Multi-company  Get your consolidated trial balance and consolidate statistics in real time.		Dashboard & KPIs  Get customizable real time statistics with drill-up, drill-down, filter, drill-across data.

Source
Serpent Consulting.

OpenERP & SAP - officially compared! Check out who gets a beating!

Feridis, Luxembourg based IT company, has published in November last year a book analysing the leader (SAP) and the challenger (OpenERP) of the enterprise management software. This book has generated a lot of reactions in the SAP and OpenERP communities, so they have decided to release their book for free, or the price of one tweet.
This book, "OpenERP evaluation with SAP as reference", exposes the SAP experts’ eye on an emerging solution i.e. OpenERP.  It puts into perspective the advantages of their implementation  methodologies, the differences in the features, customization approaches, and business models.
This new book which gives you an idea on everything you ever needed to know about what an ERP can do. Through detailed analysis, it evaluates and compares SAP, the leader, and OpenERP, the challenger, so you can judge for yourself.
SAP  users will discover in this book how OpenERP solves the same problems  as SAP but with a totally different approach and point of view in terms of marketing, product development and distribution model. At the other end, OpenERP users will discover what makes SAP the world leader  in the enterprise management software market.
Through this book, you will learn how to assess differently OpenERP and SAP based on your specific needs, avoid hidden costs of an OpenERP or SAP implementation and the advantages of different implementation methodologies. Moreover, you will discover what makes SAP such a good and popular product and how OpenERP SA succeed to build a software comparable to SAP in only 5 years.
Do you want to get your hands on a copy of this book before anyone else?  Hot of the press, this book is available on Amazon (http://amzn.to/zs28CN), but you can have your free copy by paying with a tweet.
 
To download the free ebook: http://bit.ly/wVTxjo

Danone goes Openerp over SAP

“Although Danone is a significant SAP client, the industry giant decided to use an
open source integrated ERP solution for the emerging countries where it operates.
OpenERP was identified as a good SAP alternative for Danone small entities.
OpenERP was integrated in three entities of Danone in Columbia, Argentina and
Australia.
Although the company has invested a lot for several years
implementing SAP, it proved not to fit the needs that Danone had in the green
field entities. From 2007, the structure of the group has changed, finding itself in
the position to manage smaller entities that were not necessarily generating big
revenue.
So, implementing their core model in SAP didn't make sense.
Consequently, a less expensive and more flexible solution was sought, allowing
faster implementations. Even though SAP covers a large array of needs, it's non-
modular integrated software, leaving not much room for errors.
Currently,
Danone develops a platform in order to synchronise OpenERP with SAP”.

6.1 POS

OpenERP 6.1 version has come with very effective Point-of-Sale module. OpenERP 6.0.3 version also contains the same module but the major difference is, here it is a New touchscreen OpenERP Point of Sale interface.

The system works offline when internal connection not available. The data get synchronize as soon as the internet connection is available. This functionality will work on all the touch screen like iPad, iPod, any Tablet PC.

The key features are as follows :

• Full touchscreen for product picking

• Effective searching of products by category on click

• Selection of Products/ Rate/ Qty to be sold on a single click

• Offers multiple payment methods like Cash/ bank, Cheque etc

• Multiple Sale Tickets (PoS Orders) can be generated at a same time

• Selectable products though Barcode Reader, Browsing Categories, Or Text Search

• Receipt Voucher generation on sale

   


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Source : Pragtech 

Why SME’s & SMB are Selecting Open Source ?

Enterprise Resource planning – ERP software used by big organization to manage their business process and to gain competitive edge in the business area. Any ERP software is selected to streamline their internal business processes. But now the focus of an ERP software implementation is changing from big organization to small and mid sized companies or SMB’s. Previously this was not the case with SME’s as any ERP implementation required heavy investment, time, effort money and due to high risks

Today SME’s are implementing ERP  and business software to gain the advantages of a Proper enterprise resource planning tool and this is because of Open source ERP  software available in the market easily with different modules to start with. Open source ERP software is attracting small and medium sized enterprises to implement ERP solution to manage their business. Another part is lots of ERP vendors started implementing ERP solutions for SME & SMB as the market is huge.

Let’s have a look on the most powerful points where SME are opting for Open source ERP solutions for their businesses.

Costing : One of the most important factors affecting SME to opt for Open source ERP software is the cost. As Open source allows you free code and installation and the company doesn’t have to pay heavy software licence fees every year, which was one of the case with the proprietary ERP software. Hence being costing is one of the factor and Open source ERP doesn’t involve any license fees and maintenance cost.

Easy and quick implementation : As being open to the community and lots of implementation material available online it get easy to implement open source ERP  with the help of technical team, SME’s can also opt for vendor implementation options if require.

Flexible: Another important point of selecting Open source ERP  software is the flexibility and customization ability in the tool, which is very difficult with the proprietary software and that too it involves high investment for certain customization.

Freedom: Open source provides you with the freedom, freedom from the vendor locking, freedom from licensing and so on. The source code of the Open source ERP software is with the client where he can modify in further future and can take support from the vendor whenever necessary.

Training and support: The support and bug fixing gets easy as communities are open to help for the bug fixing part; also the training after the implementation is minimal as compare to the Proprietary

We have covered some of the advantages on why SME’s are opting for open source ERP software but there are disadvantages too if not selected properly. It is necessary for an SME to do a proper study of their business processes before selecting Open source ERP package accordingly. There are lots of Open source ERP software available in the market some of them are OpenERP , OpenBravo, Compiere and so on. . Normally open source ERP software are targeted to those companies whose needs are not covered by the normal ERP  software available in the market and organization whose processes are not standard

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OpenERP LAN vs Cloud Benchmark

Benchmarks with OpenERP server hosted on the Internet

As Akretion starts to host some OpenERP servers for its SMB customers, we want to propose them a solution that is both fast and secure. So far, the majority of our customers host the OpenERP server on their LAN and access it via the Gtk Client through the Net-RPC protocol. The Net-RPC protocol is fast but not secure : the passwords and all the data are sent in clear, but our customers consider that, as the connection is made over their LAN, it’s not a problem. By the way, it is probably a bad assumption, because a lot of IT attacks against companies come from the inside ! And when our customers need to access OpenERP from outside the office, they connect by VPN to their LAN and then they use OpenERP as usual with Gtk Client and Net-RPC protocol.
In order to select the best option for our customers that access an OpenERP server over the Internet, we made a real-life benchmark with an OpenERP server running on a machine in a datacenter, and elaborated a precise usage scenario. Basically, the scenario consist in a full purchase workflow (PO, reception of goods, supplier invoice) and a full sale workflow (SO, delivery order, customer invoice). For each protocol, we executed this scenario manually multiple times. We kept the fastest timing that was measured. As we ran the scenario manually, we estimate that the results are valid with a 10 seconds accuracy.

Bench with OpenERP server hosted on the Internet

	Net-RPC	Net-RPC inside SSH tunnel	XML-RPC	XML-RPC SSL	HTTP access with Firefox 7	HTTP access with Chrome 14	HTTPS access through an Nginx proxy with Chrome 14
Secure ?	no	yes	no	yes	no	no	yes
OpenERP 6.0.3	1 min 49	1 min 47	2 min 11	3 min 08	2 min 04	2 min 11	2 min 05
OpenERP 6.1 (trunk)	1 min 42	1 min 40	1 min 52	not available ?	buggy	1 min 43	1 min 40

Bench with an OpenERP server hosted on the LAN

	Net-RPC
OpenERP 6.0.3	1 min 15
OpenERP 6.1 (trunk)	1 min 08

Here is our analysis of the results of this benchmark :

• OpenERP 6.1 is faster than OpenERP 6.0, thanks to the optimisations in the code of the server and addons (and also thanks to an ergonomy improvement on invoice generation from delivery orders).
• XML-RPC SSL is not an option because it’s too slow. If you activate the debug logs on the OpenERP server, you will see that the SSL session is re-established for every request, which explains the bad performances.
• on OpenERP 6.0, Net-RPC is the fastest, but the Web interface is not too far behind : only 15% slower.
• on OpenERP 6.1, the Web interface is as fast as Net-RPC !

The developers of the new Web interface of OpenERP 6.1 made a great job ! Thumbs up !
As a conclusion, for those who plan to use an OpenERP server over the Internet, the best option is  to run version 6.1

Source : akretion

The POS

The brand new OpenERP touchscreen point of sale available with 6.1 allows you to manage your shop sales very easily. It’s fully web based so that you don’t have to install or deploy any software and all the sales shops can be easily consolidated. It works in connected and disconnected modes so that you can continue to sell if you lose your internet connection.

Here’s a summary of its main features and benefits:
100% WEB based

• available for any touchscreen device (ipod, ipad, any tablet)
• mobile (with portable devices)
• no installation required

Packed as a standard OpenERP module

• no installation, easy deployment
• allows customization & adapts to different needs

Integrated with OpenERP

• no synchronization needed, completely integrated
• all OpenERP available, use OpenERP for backend
• consolidate shops almost in real time

Work offline, with no server connection

• continue working even when your connection is down
• if you close your browser, data won’t be lost

Easy to use

• fully web based with a clean interface
• smart interface

You have different options to select your products. You can do it through the barcode reader, just browse through the categories you have put in place (ie. drinks, snacks, meals, etc.), or text search in case neither of the other options work for you.
If you need to use the POS for your restaurant, for example, your employees can record at the same time multiple tickets without having to wait to do one transaction at a time. Along, to facilitate payment, the application allows multiple payment methods.
The POS application is so simple and accessible to use that your shop or restaurant will never need any other tool to manage orders. Due to its smart and user-friendly interface you don’t need any training to learn how to use it. Think of it as an out-of-the-box solution to boost your business’ productivity.