Category: ERPNext

The partner at a 40-person engineering services firm told me her utilisation was around 78%. She was confident. She’d been tracking it for years. Then we asked the engineers to log their time the same day they did the work.

Utilisation came out at 61%. The difference, over a year, was roughly 2,300 hours — work that had been done but never billed, or billed under a fixed fee that should never have been fixed.

The leak nobody wanted to look at

Time was being recorded on Friday afternoons, from memory, for the whole week. That’s not dishonesty. It’s just how humans work. People remember meetings and big tasks, and they forget the two-hour troubleshooting call on Tuesday that nobody scheduled.

Worse, those forgotten hours were invisible to project managers. So a project that was running 30 hours over budget looked fine until the invoice went out and the margin had already evaporated.

What actually changed

Three things, and the first one is the one people resist.

1. Time entered daily, in three minutes or less. One screen, project code, hours, done. No descriptions required for routine work.
2. Project budgets visible to the people doing the work, not just to the partners. If you’re at 85% of budget with 40% of the job left, you should know that on Tuesday.
3. Any work outside the original scope gets flagged in the moment and priced before it becomes free advice.

The daily entry rule lasted, but only after the firm dropped the requirement to write a description for every line. Cutting the form from nine fields to three raised compliance from 40% to 96% in six weeks.

The uncomfortable conversation

Once change requests were being recorded, the firm discovered it had been absorbing an average of 14 extra hours per client project, worth about £90,000 a year across the business.

Some clients pushed back. Most didn’t. The ones who did were mostly relieved to have clarity about what was included and what wasn’t — the fog had been costing them too.

Within a year, revenue per engineer rose 19% without a single rate increase. The work was always there. It just wasn’t being seen, and unseen work never gets invoiced.

An ERPNext Consulting engagement at this stage is less about systems and more about visibility: who sees what, and when. That’s what turned this firm around.

Try one thing next week. Ask your team to log their time the same day, even if it’s rough. Compare that week’s total against how you’d normally record it. The gap between those two numbers is the money you’re already leaving on the table.

The order was 40% bigger than anything this customer had ever placed. Everyone was delighted. Sales celebrated. Nobody checked the credit limit, because the customer had been reliable for six years.

Ninety days later, £240,000 was outstanding, the customer had stopped answering the phone, and a 35-person wholesaler was having a very uncomfortable conversation with its bank.

It wasn’t one bad decision — it was a missing step

Credit limits existed on paper. They just weren’t enforced anywhere. When a customer exceeded their limit, the system allowed it and sent a polite report to finance at month end, by which point the goods had long since shipped.

There was also no rule about larger-than-usual orders. A customer ordering three times their normal volume is a signal worth investigating — a new contract, a cash flow problem, or a business about to fold. All three look identical at the order screen.

The finance manager described her job at the time as “writing letters nobody answers”. That’s not credit control. That’s archaeology.

What they put in place

Six changes, in this order. None of them were expensive, and all of them annoyed at least one person for the first month.

1. A hard credit limit that stops an order at the point of entry, not after shipping
2. An automatic hold when a customer reaches 80% of their limit, so there’s a conversation before the wall
3. A weekly 20-minute aged debt review with one salesperson in the room, because collections need sales pressure, not just finance letters
4. Any new customer’s first three orders over £10,000 require a 30% deposit
5. Any order more than double a customer’s largest previous order gets reviewed before confirmation
6. A rule that sales commission is paid on cash received, not invoiced

That last one caused the loudest argument and produced the fastest change. Once commission depended on money in the bank, salespeople started making collection calls before finance had to.

Eighteen months later

Days sales outstanding fell from 68 to 41. Bad debt dropped to under £15,000 for the year. And the company took on four new large customers without any drama, because the process told them how to structure each one.

The sales director, who fought the deposit rule hardest, now uses it as a filter for customers worth having.

An ERPNext Consulting review later confirmed the pattern: the tools mattered less than the rule about commission. Incentives shape behaviour faster than policies ever will.

Open your aged debt report today and look at your five largest overdue accounts. If any of them can still place a new order right now without anyone needing to approve it, that’s the gap to close first.

Every Friday at 2pm, a 70-person metal fabricator held a meeting to decide what the factory would build the following week. It ran two hours. It usually ended with someone saying, “we’ll sort the rest out Monday.”

Which meant Monday started with another meeting, and the first shift often stood around waiting for instructions. The production manager estimated they lost four to six hours of machine time every Monday. That’s roughly 250 hours a year on the biggest machine alone.

Why the Friday meeting kept failing

Three things kept breaking it. First, nobody could see real capacity — the schedule lived in three spreadsheets and a whiteboard, and the whiteboard won arguments. Second, rush orders arrived constantly and jumped the queue without anyone removing what they displaced.

Third, machine breakdowns were handled by memory. When the press went down for a day, everyone improvised, and the plan was quietly abandoned by Wednesday.

None of that is a software problem, by the way. It’s a visibility problem with a software-shaped solution.

What replaced the two-hour meeting

The ERPNext Consulting team did something simple first: they built a single view showing every open job, the hours it needed per machine, and the delivery date. It took three weeks to get reliable, mostly because the shop floor data was being entered a day late.

Then came the rule that changed behaviour: a rush order must name the job it displaces. If a salesperson wants to jump the queue, they pick what gets pushed. No picking, no jumping.

Within a month, rush orders dropped by half. Not because customers changed — because salespeople started asking whether the rush was worth pushing out a delivery they’d already promised.

• Job status updated by the machine operator at start and finish, not at end of shift
• Downtime logged with a reason code, three taps on a tablet
• A rolling six-day schedule instead of a fixed weekly plan, so Tuesday surprises don’t wreck the whole week
• Friday meeting shortened to 30 minutes, and only for exceptions

The numbers after four months

On-time delivery went from 71% to 92%. Overtime dropped around 30%. Work-in-progress value fell by roughly £95,000 because jobs stopped sitting half-finished waiting for a decision.

The most surprising result was cultural. Two machine operators started suggesting schedule changes, because for the first time they could see why the sequence was what it was.

If your planning meeting runs longer than an hour, you’re doing scheduling work inside a meeting that should have been done before anyone walked in. Track how many hours you lose every Monday morning for two weeks. That number will tell you whether this is worth your attention.

Most managers think the hard part of running two warehouses is the technology. It isn’t. The hard part is deciding who owns stock when it’s sitting on a truck between them.

I’ve watched a 45-person wholesaler discover £52,000 of inventory that had been “in transit” for more than 90 days. Nobody stole it. Nobody lost it. It just fell into a gap where both sites assumed the other one was counting it.

Mistake one: assuming one system means one truth

Putting both sites on the same system doesn’t end the arguments. It just gives both sides a shared screen to argue about. If Site A thinks it sent 40 units and Site B thinks it received 36, one system doesn’t tell you who’s right — it only tells you they disagree faster.

What fixes it is a rule about timing. Every transfer gets confirmed at dispatch and again at receipt, and any gap over 24 hours raises a flag the same day, not at month end.

Mistake two: treating transfers as paperwork

Transfers feel like admin. In practice, they’re where money quietly disappears. A truck that sits unloaded over a weekend, a delivery note signed but never entered, a pallet counted at the wrong site — each one is small. Together they add up fast.

• Every transfer gets a same-day dispatch confirmation, no exceptions
• Receiving has 24 hours to confirm or the transfer shows as outstanding
• Anything outstanding over three days goes on a Friday list with a name next to it

Mistake three: running both sites the same way

The busier site and the quieter site need different reorder points. That sounds obvious, but most companies copy the same settings across both because it’s easier than thinking about it.

One site might serve walk-in trade with unpredictable daily demand. The other might feed a handful of large accounts on predictable schedules. Same rules, different reality.

When the wholesaler in question set separate reorder points and separate counting frequencies per site, their total inventory value dropped 14% in five months while service levels stayed flat. They were simply holding the wrong stock in the wrong place.

A separate ERPNext Consulting review of the same business found the biggest single improvement came from something unglamorous: a clear rule that stock in transit belongs to the sending site until the receiving site confirms it. One sentence, agreed once, ended months of finger-pointing.

Before your next stock count, pull a list of everything currently in transit and how long it’s been moving. You’ll probably find a few items older than a week. That list tells you exactly where to start.

“How long for a quote on twelve oak desks?” The customer asked on a Tuesday. “About a week,” the sales rep said. “Don’t bother,” the customer replied, and hung up.

A sales manager at a 25-person custom furniture maker overheard that call from the next desk. It wasn’t unusual. It was Thursday morning and that same thing had happened twice already that week.

Where the week actually went

Quoting wasn’t hard. It was just slow, and the slowness came from six people touching every single quote. The sales rep wrote the requirements. A drafter checked dimensions. The workshop manager estimated hours. Purchasing priced the timber. Someone checked finish options against the supplier list. Then the owner signed off.

Each step took a day or less. Six steps, plus waiting, added up to six or seven days. And in custom furniture, a week is an eternity — the customer has usually already called two competitors by Wednesday.

Guess what the fix wasn’t

It wasn’t a faster spreadsheet, and it wasn’t hiring another estimator. The problem was that every quote was treated as brand new, even though 80% of them reused the same 40 or so components.

So the team built a priced options list: standard timber types, standard finishes, standard leg profiles, standard edge treatments. Each option had a cost and a lead time attached, kept current by purchasing. Anything outside the list still went to the drafter, which turned out to be about two quotes a week instead of twelve.

• Eight finish options priced and dated, updated every Monday morning
• Twelve standard desk and table sizes with fixed workshop hours
• Three delivery zones with real freight costs, not guesses
• A rule that any quote needing a custom component gets flagged at the start, not discovered on day five

Ninety days later

Quote turnaround went from six days to same-day for anything using standard options. Win rate moved from 34% to 51%, partly because speed itself wins work, and partly because the team stopped losing track of quotes in someone’s inbox.

An ERPNext Consulting review six months in found something the owners hadn’t expected: the average order value went up 11%, because salespeople could now show priced options and customers picked more of them.

Speed didn’t just win deals. It changed what customers were willing to buy.

Try this before you spend anything. Count how many people touch a single quote before it reaches the customer. If the answer is more than two, you’ve found your bottleneck, and it’s almost never solved by working harder.

Twelve days. That’s how long a 60-person manufacturer took to close its books every month. The finance team wasn’t slow — they spent most of those twelve days waiting on other people.

I asked the finance manager to log what she was actually waiting for. The results embarrassed everyone, including her.

The 12 days, broken down honestly

Days one to three: chasing shipping to confirm what actually left the dock, because the dispatch notes and the system disagreed on 8 to 12 lines every month. Days four to six: three sales reps who filed expense claims “when they got a minute”.

Days seven to nine: matching purchase invoices to receipts, with roughly 200 invoices a month and no reliable way to tell which ones had a matching delivery. Days ten to twelve: fixing the mess that the first nine days created.

Not one of those twelve days involved analysis. The company had a finance team doing detective work instead of looking at margins.

Three rules that did most of the work

The ERPNext Consulting engagement started with a simple question: who is allowed to change a number, and when? That question produced most of the fixes.

1. Nothing leaves the dock without being confirmed in the system the same day. Dispatch owns this, not finance.
2. Expense claims get submitted by Friday or they roll to next month. Two reminders, then it rolls. No exceptions, including the sales director.
3. Goods received are recorded at the door, so a purchase invoice either matches automatically or lands in a short exception queue.

The exception queue turned out to be the most valuable part. Instead of reviewing 200 invoices, the team reviewed 14. The other 186 cleared themselves, and anything odd stood out immediately.

What four extra days bought them

Close dropped to four days. But the unexpected win was what showed up in the gap: £71,000 a year in duplicate payments and missed supplier credits that had been hiding inside the pile.

The finance manager now spends the second week of every month on margin by product line, not on reconciliation. That’s a different job, and she says it’s the first time in nine years she’s enjoyed it.

Here’s your next step. For one month, keep a log. Every day, write down exactly what you’re waiting for and who owes it to you. The pattern will point at one or two bottlenecks, and those are the only things worth fixing first.

It’s 7:10 on a Monday morning. A 30-person industrial parts distributor has three orders that must leave by noon, and two of them need the same pump seal. The shelf holds four. The system says eleven.

That gap, repeated across 4,000 SKUs, is what got the owners to pick up the phone. Not because they wanted new software — because they were burning about £18,000 a month on split shipments, rush freight, and credits handed out to keep angry customers quiet.

The real problem wasn’t the software

When an ERPNext Consulting team walked the floor, they found stock living in four different truths: the system, a paper pick list, a spreadsheet the warehouse lead kept “just in case”, and whatever the sales team remembered promising a customer.

Four truths means four numbers. And once people can’t tell which number is right, they quietly stop trusting all of them and start working around the system instead.

• The receiving desk logged deliveries the next morning, so anything arriving after 3pm stayed invisible for a day
• Sales promised stock without checking, then split orders into two shipments and ate the extra freight
• Cycle counts happened once a year, in the week half the team was on holiday

Six weeks, three changes

No big bang. No six-month freeze on new orders. Here’s what actually moved the needle, in the order it happened.

1. Scan goods in at the door the moment the truck arrives. One handheld, one person, about 20 minutes per delivery.
2. Give sales a live availability screen — the same number the warehouse sees, refreshed every few minutes.
3. Count the top 200 moving items every Friday. Two people, 90 minutes, finished before lunch.

By week four the paper pick list was gone. Nobody issued a rule banning it. It just became slower than the screen, so people stopped picking it up.

What came back

Stockouts on the top 200 items fell from roughly 60 a month to 6. Emergency freight dropped by about £9,000 a month. Two people who used to spend their mornings hunting for misplaced pallets went back to serving customers.

The clearest sign things had changed: the warehouse lead stopped maintaining his private spreadsheet. Eleven years of workarounds disappeared in five weeks, and that told the owners more than any dashboard.

Total spend on the ERPNext Consulting work came in below the cost of three months of expedited shipping. If your stock numbers are a mess, do this on Friday: pull your 20 highest-revenue items, count them by hand, and compare against your system. Whatever the gap is, that’s your real accuracy rate — a far better starting point than any feature list.

An apparel importer with 25 staff and 12,000 SKUs ran its entire operation on spreadsheets. There was a spreadsheet for inventory, one for purchase orders, one for the bank, and a legendary file called “Final Final Stock 2023 v4” that everyone knew was wrong but nobody dared delete. When two different versions of a popular shirt showed different quantities, the owner assumed one was a typo. It wasn’t. It was two different suppliers’ versions of the same shirt, with the same name in two different styles, entered years apart.

The old system wasn’t the problem. The old data was.

The first attempt to move to a proper system had failed for a simple reason: the team tried to import all Excel files as they were. Every SKU code, supplier name, and unit of measure came from a different era. One item was measured in cartons on purchase orders and in pieces in the sales file. Nobody had defined which one was the base unit, so the system showed some orders needing 600,000 pieces when the warehouse held 600.

ERPNext Consulting took a different approach: clean the data outside the system first, and make the clean version visible to the people who know the products every day — not to an IT specialist.

Five rules that made the migration boring

• Do not merge products that look similar “to save time.” Create them as separate records and mark the old one inactive later. Merging without proper research creates a permanent mess.
• Agree on one base unit per product for all purchases and sales, and enter that as a fixed rule. Pieces and cartons can live as packaging details, but they never drive the stock count.
• Let the purchasing manager review the final product list in small batches — no one stares at 12,000 records in a day. Batches of 500 worked well here.
• Import inventory balances only after a physical count of that exact storage location. Never carry over a spreadsheet balance that hasn’t been verified on a shelf.
• Hold a full dress rehearsal one weekend before the real go-live, and make the whole warehouse team practice receiving and picking from the new system with a small batch of items.

The dress rehearsal that saved the launch

During the rehearsal, the team discovered that mobile barcode scanning into the new system returned the wrong bin for about 40 SKUs because the old location codes had been typed into Excel with inconsistent spaces. Fixing that before the real cutover took two hours. Since the go-live, the warehouse finds 99.6% of all items within two minutes. In the old world, the owner would have thought that target was a joke.

A good migration is more about convincing people to look at one clean list than about the technology. ERPNext Consulting’s consultants spent most of their time sitting with the purchasing manager, asking “is this the same product as this?” until the team themselves realized how much energy the old spreadsheets were consuming. The system will only ever be as clean as the master data you feed it on day one. Spend the extra week cleaning now, and you will never spend a month reconciling the mess later.

A family group ran an import trading company, a local distribution arm, and a small service company, all sharing one office, one warehouse, and a bookkeeper who had been there for 16 years. Every month, the external accountant spent nine working days producing three profit-and-loss statements and then a fourth “combined” version that never quite matched because money moved between the companies informally. The owner could not tell you, on the 10th of any month, whether the group was actually making money.

The float that hid the real damage

One of the companies had been paying for the warehouse renovation, but the cost had been booked as an expense rather than a loan to the shared entity. Another company’s employees routinely worked on the service company’s projects, but their hours were never transferred, so the service business looked far less profitable than it was. The family members had been making decisions using numbers that were off by enough to delay a new hire for months.

ERPNext Consulting started by mapping how money and work actually moved between the three legal entities. Every intercompany transfer, from a shared forklift to an employee’s week of work, needed a price and a paper trail. Business managers hate this at first because it feels like charging your own family for a favor.

One shared master list instead of three separate worlds

The core fix had two parts. First, all three companies use the same chart structure for master data, so a supplier record lives once and is shared, with a label for which legal entity buys from it. Second, intercompany charges are created automatically each month from actual usage rather than from the bookkeeper’s memory.

The monthly routine looks like this:

1. By the second working day, each warehouse manager confirms cycle counts and posts any missing stock adjustments.
2. By the fourth working day, the bookkeeper runs a reconciliation of the intercompany accounts. Any difference above $500 gets investigated before the close.
3. On the fifth working day, the accountant produces consolidated group numbers, with intercompany loans and sales eliminated automatically.

Three days, not nine — and one surprise

Within two months, the close went from nine days to three. The actual surprise was bigger: during cleanup, they discovered a $240,000 intercompany cash advance that was sitting on the books of the wrong entity, making one company look desperate and another look idle. When multiple entities share staff and money, the loan ledger is where clarity goes to die.

If you run more than one company, stop reviewing each company’s profit in isolation. Review the intercompany balances first, because they are usually the biggest distortion in the whole group. ERPNext Consulting built a simple monthly report that lists every uncleared transaction between the entities, and the rule is simple: nothing closes until that list is either settled or explained.

A midsize sauce and preserves maker ran a mock recall drill because a major retailer required it. The scenario: a batch of hot sauce had to be traced from raw ingredients to the store shelves. The quality manager started looking through paper production logs from three months earlier. She found the batch number, then had to walk the warehouse to identify pallets because the records showed only “production run rough date.” Four hours and twenty minutes later, they could tell the auditor which stores received the batch. The retailer’s requirement: 20 minutes.

The problem was hidden in the pallet labels

In this plant, two workers filled and labeled jars on a fast line, writing batch references on a paper sheet at the start of each shift. When jars were packed onto pallets, the pallet stickers only showed the product name and the date. If two batches were packed on the same day, which many were, the information simply melted together. The quality manager confesses they had already shipped a batch with the wrong best-before label without noticing, and only a customer complaint about a sour jar revealed it.

ERPNext Consulting started with one question: what does the retailer need you to prove about one jar in your finished goods? The answer was a simple chain of evidence from raw material lots, through production, to the dispatch note.

The batch routine that produces usable records

The solution wasn’t exotic. It was discipline applied to three moments that already existed in the day:

• When production starts, a printed batch ticket is generated, and it accompanies the line until the run ends. The operator writes nothing by hand.
• When materials are issued from the store, the system keeps track of which raw material lot went into which production batch. Leftover ingredients are returned and recorded on the same day, not dumped back into the next shift’s pot.
• Every finished pallet gets a label with batch number, best-before date and location code. A pallet without a label is quarantined, not shipped.

That last rule hurt most. In the first week, three pallets were delayed because stickers had not been printed. The warehouse manager called it “stupid paperwork.” Two months later, during a surprise audit mock recall, the same drill took 90 seconds.

Why this matters beyond the audit checklist

Trackable batches also cut their write-offs. Previously, when one lot was suspected of a problem, the entire day’s production was blocked because they couldn’t tell which pallets were safe. With proper lot records, only the affected batch was quarantined. In one recall-like situation, that meant blocking 240 jars instead of 2,400. The value of traceability shows itself in the panic moment, not in the calm one.

If you sell food, cosmetics or any regulated product, test your own recall procedure this month. Run the drill exactly as the auditors would: pick a random batch and time how long it takes to find every receiving point. ERPNext Consulting often finds that the weak link isn’t the system — it’s pallets sitting somewhere missing a label to scan.