The ERPNext Newsletter 📰 March 2021

It’s good to see vaccinations rolling out worldwide and the atmosphere approaching somewhat normal. Speaking of normal, the team wasn’t feeling much of that with the daily digital routine. So we went on a small trip where I saw many old and new faces. There wasn’t much to do but talk, eat, drink, and get familiar. After getting our oral and nasal passages defiled (probably the first time for many), all in all the trip did leave a happy and energized feeling. Rushabh has his perspective on all this which he talks about in Pune Trip: Live Another Day.

On with the product news, we have updates on new product features like project templates, new bank reconciliation, ESS users, and item pricing.

Coming to blogs, some of you must be eager about the new release and design so there’s a post about the new design. (New release coming in a few weeks). We have blogs on just in time inventory and blanket orders to give you tips on managing inventory better and how to maximize your storage space.

At Frappe we also had some engaging discussions about incentives for the team members.

ERPNext Updates

Let’s see the product updates brought to you this month:

• With the new feature ‘Project Template with Dependent tasks’, you can make a task to be used as a part of a Project Template. What this will do is add sub tasks and dependent tasks to the Project Template. This will be useful when creating multiple projects which have common sub and dependent tasks. Know more here.
• In salary slips, now you can see the total salary outgo per employee from year start to current date.
• The bank reconciliation feature also gets a complete overhaul in the new design. A lot of hiccups were removed, the form looks fresh, and now works smoothly. Like the name suggests, this feature allows you to match ERPNext ledger records with your bank statements.
• A new user type called Employee Self Service has been introduced. It’s for limited access users, they can access up to 10 doctypes. Access can be restricted for employees to only leave applications, expense claims, and so on.
• With batch wise Item Pricing, now you can also link a specific batch to an Item Price. On selecting that specific batch in a transaction, the item price for that specific batch will be applied instead of the regular Item Price.

Blogs

Let’s see some articles from the ERPNext blog this month:

• You must’ve seen some screens of the new ERPNext design. It’ll come with the v13 production release due in a few weeks. Meanwhile you must be wondering about the new design, so let’s see What’s new in the Frappe and ERPNext V13 redesign?
• Managing inventory right in a manufacturing line is a challenging task, to say the least. That’s why some companies sort of give up on stocking inventory and do it just in time. Read more about it in Just in time inventory - the pros, cons, and examples of this lean method.
• On the other hand, if you do have your demands and material consumption figured out, placing those multiple purchase orders is a pain. All that logistics, finding suppliers, negotiating every time, all of this is time consuming. I have two words for you: ‘Blanket order’, learn more in What is a blanket order and should you do it for your business?
• Your amazing host/author completed two years at Frappe recently. Read about his journey in My second year at Frappe.

What’s up at Frappe

Incentives?

From our discussions at Friday Forums, the topics of incentive pay stood out. Well, mostly because it came up in more than one friday forum. And it is brought to you by, you guessed it, the sales team. The essence of the discussions is that they want incentive pay for bringing in sales. But as someone said, wins are team efforts, someone makes the product, someone sells it, someone sees that it’s successful for the customer, and someone ensures that future problems are solved. So it’s difficult for everyone to see eye to eye on this one.

FOSS united

• FOSS United hosted a meetup where many FOSS enthusiasts talked about various topics from self hosting to creative coding and even mess management. Check out the FOSS meetup here.

• Also check out the FOSS roundtable discussion about FOSS and industry here.

• There is FOSS inside India's tech unicorns, even though they may not acknowledge it publically.

Last month at Frappe, we welcomed two new team members—one in consulting and one developer.

Think a friend/colleague would like this newsletter? Go ahead and share it.

Cheers,

Prasad from Frappe.

erpnext.com

P.S. Sorry about the late email. A bit occupied with a small finger injury.