Posts by Paolo:
- Time (accounting date, further grouped into periods and fiscal years)
- Accounting schema (which is the "policy" used for accounting)
- Organization
- Account (further grouped by nature of the account: asset, liability, revenue or expense)
- Product (further grouped into categories)
- Business partner (further grouped into categories)
- Project
- Sales region
- Marketing campaign
- User defined 1
- User defined 2
- Revenues by product categories and periods
- Expenses by organizations
- Top 10 revenue generating customers
- Margin by product
- Project profitability
- etc.
- A web based ERP gives you global visibility in all of your company locations with minimal infrastructure requirements and no IT complexity.
- A web based ERP allows you to access your company information anytime, anywhere, from any device.
You can for example connect from the airport on your way to a Board Meeting and verify if that big sale has been closed within the quarter, without the need to travel to or to call the office.
Guess what? You are not forced to choose Windows. If you or your staff prefer to work on MacOS, it works on that too (not to mention smartphones and tablets). - A web based ERP has a single point of maintenance. Single server, single database, single IT team all mean lower cost of operation, maintenance and upgrade and a significant reduction in total cost of ownership.
- A web based ERP makes expanding to a new location a breeze as the additional IT investment is minimal. There is no need to deploy distributed servers or powerful PCs in every site; an Internet connection and a standard browser is all you need.
- A web based ERP allows all employees to participate in your business process automation, resulting in better data, better visibility and better control. This means more accurate and timely insight in your company performance and therefore higher margins. For example, the sales team can access the invoice and payment history of their customers anytime, anywhere, without having to call the finance department; this reduces the load on the finance team and allows them to do their job more productively.
- A web based ERP allows the extended organization - including all employees, suppliers and customers - to collaborate more effectively as they can always be connected to the company's information system. For example, suppliers can view your stock levels in real time and ensure timely replenishment while customers can review the status of an order and see when it will be shipped.
- A web based ERP allows telecommuting and increases the morale of your employees. Staffers working with customers at their sites do not need to stop by the office on Friday to complete a time sheet. They can do it from their smartphone on their way home.
- A web based ERP allows you to easily integrate external services such as email, analytics or CRM,creating mashups where the resulting combination brings more value than the individual components.
- A web based ERP means that you can live the cloud life and not worry about losing you ERP access if your PC crashes or employees losing their laptop with confidential data in it.
- A web based ERP allows small and medium business owners, who often have to play the role of the IT guy for their staff to spend their week ends with their family instead of installing and upgrading client software in the company's PCs.
- More than 70,000 downloads
- More than 6,000 new installations
- More than 200 deployments of Openbravo 3 Community Edition
- More than 30 on going implementations of Openbravo 3 Professional Edition
Beyond automation with integrated financial and managerial accounting
November 23rd, 2011One of the benefits of an ERP is the automation of accounting based on operational transactions. Any good ERP would automatically generate accounting based on the transactions recorded in the system, such as invoices, payments, asset movements, etc. This way your organization can focus on execution, while an accounting view of the business is automatically generated behind the scenes, allowing you to produce your end of period financial statements with no or minimal user intervention.
Financial statements, however, can only go so far in supporting your decision making processes and most businesses complement their financialaccounting view with additional measures or KPI (Key Performance Indicators) to support management decisions. Unlike financial statements, these measures are not standardized and vary radically from organization to organization. Examples of KPI include: revenues by product or by customer, expenses by department, customer profitability, etc.
Unlike other ERPs, Openbravo provides an integrated accounting system that combines financial accounting and managerial accounting, facilitating the process of complementing the financial statements with managerial measures while ensuring that these two views are always consistent and easy to reconcile.
With Openbravo, all documents having an accounting relevance generate an accounting representation in a single data store - called the FACT_ACCT table, short for accounting facts - which is a multi-dimensional datamart that allows to report based on any dimension.
The supported dimensions are:
For financial accounting, you would primarily exploit the account dimension. For example, a Balance Sheet report allows you to report the position of the asset and liabilities accounts at a given point in time, while an Income Statement report allows you to report the activity in the revenue and expense accounts.
For managerial accounting, you would exploit the other dimensions as well. For example you can analyze the data in the FACT_ACCT table to get the following metrics:
Additionally, Openbravo 3 allows you to define and implement any KPI using Query List Widgets that allow you to visualize the performance of your company right out of the Openbravo Workspace.
Finally, it is very easy to expose the content of the FACC_ACCT table into business intelligence tools, such as Pentaho, JasperServer or Zoho Reports that business analysts can leverage to slice and dice the data and create charts and pivot tables to support decision making.
To experience the power of Openbravo directly, you can also visit the Demo Center.
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Top 10 reasons why web-based ERP matters to your business
September 29th, 2011We live in the golden age of computing, with major trends such as cloud computing, mobility and social network revolutionizing the way we interact with machines and consume information. In this day and age, it seems anachronistic to have to emphasize the benefits of the Internet and Internet computing.
Yet, in the world of business applications, especially for the mid-market ERP, technology seem to have stopped twenty years ago and most solutions on the market are still solidly stuck in the client/server computing paradigm of the '90s.Traditional legacy ERP solutions such as the Microsoft Dynamics products, SAGE MAS line, SAP B1 all have two tiers client/server solutions with a Microsoft Windows only client app.
These vendors are still promoting this architecture as the best computing paradigm with the excuse that in small and medium businesses all users are firmly tied to the PC on their desk and therefore the Internet does not matter.
In 2011? Really?
We asked Openbravo users what benefits they get from their web-based ERP and here are the top 10 answers:
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Openbravo 3 is awesome and it is now generally available too
June 14th, 2011
"Amazing", "brutally powerful", "it rocks", "awesome".
These are some of the adjectives and expressions that early adopters have used to describe their experience with Openbravo 3, since it was launched as a controlled release last February.
Today, almost four months later, we proudly announced that Openbravo 3 has reached the generally available status.
This milestone means that we now consider it our most stable release and we recommend it for deployment for all projects.
Even as a controlled release version, Openbravo 3 has achieved a great degree of success in the field and, after only four months, it boasts impressive statistics:
Today's announcement was very special for us and this release was not a release like many others, introducing the latest version of a product.
This milestone is the culmination of our work since the inception of the company and it marks the completion and delivery of our original vision of Agile ERP.
Openbravo 3 is a product that is easy to deploy, easy to learn; easy to use, easy to configure and extend, while still being always easy to update and upgrade.
Unlike other ERPs, Openbravo 3 is a product that enables, rather than impede, business agility. It can be put in production in a very short period of time, ensuring a rapid return of investment, and it can be expanded and modified as the organization needs change after that. It does not consume endless months of management attention during the implementation project. Once in place, it does not freeze in time the business processes of the company, harming its very ability to change, which is the essence of the competitive advantage that many small and medium organizations thrive on.
Most importantly, Openbravo 3 is a product we love and we hope that you will love it too.
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