The ERPNext Newsletter ? June 2021
Hey there,
It's June and the world is getting vaccinated faster, it was heartening to see a fall in the global number of cases. We hope you are vaccinated or they reach you soon!
June also marks the start of monsoon in India. Although it hadn’t officially arrived yet, cyclone Tauktae invited itself to shake things up. With strong winds uprooting trees casually, it gave most people a scare, a change from the monotony of lockdown.
Now, let's start with a highlight of the updates. The second set of releases V13.3 and V13.4 bring HR and transaction improvements, the Shopify integration is smoothened out for better syncing and usage, and there are a ton of fixes and enhancements.
In blogs, you’ll see two pieces on point of sale, one about the improvements in ERPNext and how it was done, another talking more about what POS systems are made of and their uses. There’s also the release blog describing all major features added recently.
In the latter half, we flaunt ERPNext’s UX rating, share a useful communication and email session, and talk about ‘energy points’ at Frappe.
Product updates
Here are some product updates for the month:
The Shopify Integration has many starting from the connector which is migrated for more reliability. There’s better data accuracy with periodic inventory sync between ERPNext warehouse and Shopify locations. This also removes the need to manually adjust inventory. Optionally, new items created in ERPNext can be uploaded to Shopify to avoid duplication of items. Order cancellation and syncing are also handled better.
With new transaction deletion features, you can delete all the documents associated with a specified company except. Although the ones listed in the “Excluded DocTypes” table in “Transaction Deletion Record” will not be deleted, you can remove items from this table. In a Company document, if you click on the “Delete Company Transactions” button, it’ll submit a “Transaction Deletion Record”.
“Employee Referrals” allows a company’s employee to refer candidates for open positions. From here, referral bonus can be linked and added to the employee’s salary who referred the new candidate. For syncing and simplicity, a Job Applicant can also be created from an Employee Referral.
From 13.4, saving sales documents is now more than 4x faster!
Blogs
And now here are some blogs:
Point of sale in ERPNext has been functional but was somewhat lacking. That is until it saw a transformation from developer Saqib which made it faster and more usable. But, in the process it also got a UI overhaul. Learn more in How point of sale in ERPNext underwent a transformation and ended up getting a makeover too.
While we’re on the subject of point of sale systems, if you’re wondering what they are made of, how they work, and it’s uses, you’d find an interesting read in What are point of sale (POS) systems and how they’re used in businesses.
The second pair of quick releases after V13 bring another long list of bug fixes but also features. The highlights are better timesheet, GST enhancements, new HR features, and find out more in ERPNext and Frappe Framework release v13.3 and v13.4.
What’s up at Frappe?
Softwareadvice frontrunners
Many users love the V13 UI, but did you know ERPNext was leading on the UX front even before 13 was out?
Don’t take my word for it, here’s the SoftwareAdvice frontrunners report for 2021:
Communications and email
Good communication is important for both within and outside companies. But do most people understand what it means to communicate well? Sure everyone knows to be simple and to the point but how do you do that? How do you ensure your thoughts are conveyed properly and you’re understood?
Well, I’ve tried to explain just that in a Communications and email session Frappe.
Points system and workplace
About 2 years ago, ‘Energy Points System’ made its way into ERPNext in the form of a new feature. It also made its way into Frappe as a medium for competition, reward, and would eventually be linked in some way to performance. But people lost interest since it didn’t quite work. A question begs to be answered, why?
Well, it can’t really work for everyone in a growing organization without someone monitoring it constantly. But it does work where tasks are similar and fixed since there’s a better relative comparison to make in such cases.
FOSS United
FOSS Meetup - June 2021 brings an AI Tool for querying natural language on tabular data, a Community Discussion, FOSS United grants, and more.
New members
Last month, we welcomed three engineers and a consultant to the team.
Think a friend/colleague would like this newsletter? Go ahead and share it.
Cheers,
Prasad from Frappe.