Just a heads up: it’s that time of year - to sign off on the book keeping and file taxes in multiple countries. It’s become exponentially more complex since we started manufacturing and stocking our own products.
I am around, but my main focus is finishing this administrative stuff ASAP. I’m hoping the first tranche is finished tomorrow.
Slow going but progress being made. Going over the first year of production has given me a lot of insight on how to improve our internal processes.
Production orders and inventory are currently in spreadsheets. We need to move that to erp asap. We are going to do a walk through for the quick connect i2c board tomorrow and test some new software.
Also, we use the last physical edition of QuickBooks accountant edition. I’m stunned to find out it is only available as a cloud service now. That’s totally unacceptable for your privacy, our privacy, data protection, and just generally terrifying. All our books only in some cloud with ongoing subscription for access and totally reliable on one company’s whim? You got to be kidding me. We need a plan to migrate away from quickbooks in the medium term before the physical copy stops working on modern OS.
Yeah, the subscription model frustrates me. Before I retired, everything was “how can we build ARR?”. Annually Recurring Revenue. Grrrr.
Today we tried out Manager.io offline version. We’ve tried opensource ERPs in the past like Odoo, ERPNext and Inventree. Either the community version is crippled, or they are way to involved for the scale of our operation. Oh yeah, we started off on GNUCash for 5+ years, and you need to be a programmer and an accountant to understand how to do much of anything in it.
Again, we are not after a free or open solution, but something offline or that we can host locally - which doesn’t seems to exist in the paid space for SMEs anymore.
Manager.io is probably the best thing we’ve tried so far for inventory management. A couple things will really improve our internal process:
This is all pretty bog-standard stuff you can do in Quick Books, but is lacking or confusing in every alternative we’ve tried. Something the office can use as well as our book keeper.
The big weakness it that it is offline. It’s not possible for more than one person to work with it at once. This is where something self hosted like ERPNext would be lovely, but it’s very much not lovely.
I think the next step is to get all our inventory and BOM spreadsheets imported. We’ll try it for quotes, inventory, and production for the rest of the year to see if it is actually workable. Hopefully it is much cleaner, better organized, and eliminates some of the repetitive stuff we’re doing on spreadsheets.
It wasn’t obvious from the website but there seems to be a self-hosted “server edition”.
The price is the same as the annual price for cloud edition except server edition is one-time purchase that comes with 12 months of maintenance. … You can continue using purchased copy of server edition forever. However new versions won’t be eligible to work with your purchased product key.
Oh wow, thank you, good find.
Almost done here. Did the final check today. A few dozen tweaks to expense categorization and we should be all done.
We finished 
I still have to deal with a few tax filers, but the hard part is done.
I may do some odds and ends cleanup on the firmware and docs before diving back into the big stuff.
