• orico
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  • Registered: 04/12/2007
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Topic: General info request about the project

I am looking for simple yet functional php-based ERP solutions and found FrontAccounting as well as WebERP and some others.

I tried both and must say FrontAccounting (let's call it FA) is actually quite user-friendly compared to WebERP (let's call it WE). So big congrats to whoever deserves the credit.

Nontheless the WE project is pretty active and seems to have a significant  user base. Quite logical as it seems that WE the grandfather of newborn FA, whose parent was OpenAccounting (let's call it OA).

So my question is : what is the purpose and orientation of FA compared to WE, and now defunct OA project ?

How does FA compares to WE :
a - same or  different DB structure ?
b - same, quite the same or different business logic ?
c - GUI : per-page enhancements, underlying GUI logic enhancement or ... ?

Actually, I am about to setup an ecommerce activity based on an ecommerce-enabled CMS. After studying several java-based ERP solutions (including beasts like Compiere/Adempiere and even the Ofbiz moooonster) I decided that I prefer to stick with php-based solution that we (me and my new and dangerous php skills) can actually tweak and control, ie. bind or merge DBs with CMS/ecommerce in a matter of days.

So if I can use FA and still stay in a (more or less strictly) WebERP-ish data model to keep going with WE dev, that's perfect . If FA grows to be something completely different, well, I might probably stick with WE and mod gradually the GUI.

I consider usability as a must-have and FreeAccounting seems to address that but I would hesitate giving-up the WebERP framework/community at the same time.

Sorry for such a long post but I think it would be good for the forum to have a "General" category with this kind of topics and a kind of "why use FA and not WE or XX ?"

Eric

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  • Registered: 03/15/2007
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Re: General info request about the project

Hello Eric,
Thanks for your opinions. WebERP (WE) is in many ways an optimal solution.

The first reason to split, at first into OpenAccounting, was to get a better structured codebase. This was good, but the bad thing was that OpenAccounting didn't have any support for reporting. They started with Jasper Report, a java based report-generator, but didn't publish that. And OpenAccounting stopped further development and turned into a Java application, OpenAccountingJ.

This was back in 2005 and we decided to fix the reporting problems by using PDF, like WE. At the same time we decided to fix another missing item, the dimensions. Up to two levels of dimensions are possible on the GL Journal transaction.  This way it is possible to keep track of e.g. cost centres, departments, projects in a 2 dimensional way. Many reports can be filtered by dimensions.

It is not our intention to move away more from already proven technology. But we would like to do some recurring things better and so on. And we are not implementing the EDI stuff that is in WE. We are moving towards a more modern electronic invoicing/payments. That is one of our future plans.

How does FA compares to WE:
a - many tables are the same, but the structure might be slightly different.
b - business logic, well quite the same, but more user-friendly approaches.
c - underlying GUI logic enhancement in our opinion.

So I guess you can easily stay in both camps.

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