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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

I've just started to take a look at LedgerSMB (perl), ERPNext (python), and Odoo (python). These are backed by Postgresql or MariaDb. Anyone have any experience with these for a small business?

For personal finance or very small businesses there is GnuCash.

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Rushabh here from the ERPNext core team. ERPNext is mostly used by small businesses with 3-50 users and covers most use cases for accounting, inventory, sales, purchase and other functions. We estimate there are between 800-1000 businesses using ERPNext at the moment. These are mostly small businesses (non tech) in services, manufacturing, distribution and retail.

The project is reasonably stable, but still takes a bit to set it up. The community is quite active (https://discuss.erpnext.com) and there is a long list of things that need to be done (https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/issues)

It has a metadata based framework and has REST API's out of the box. Its never been discussed on HN, so would love to get feedback.

I like Odoo, but, there doesn't seem to be enough glue in the Open Source release to do things like billing for services in a sane and coherent manner.

The UI for LedgerSMB is just horrible. I don't think it's really been updated since 1999.

I really haven't messed with ERPNext, mainly because I can't get it to install correctly.

It's my opinion that there really are not a lot of good, truly open source ERP/Accounting systems for businesses out there.

> I really haven't messed with ERPNext, mainly because I can't get it to install correctly.

Please post any issues, tracebacks on the forum. Install is pretty straightforward and works well for most people https://github.com/frappe/bench

Edit: You can also use the VM https://erpnext.com/download

One way to look at ERPnext is with their live demo: https://demo.erpnext.com/desk

(for example, click POS and enter an order..)

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