… at least according Smile, a French consulting company.

They studied Open-Source ERPs in their latest white paper. It is available for download here. And here is what they said about ERP5 at page 77:

ERP5 va même jusqu’à gérer les paies alors qu’aucun autre ERP libre n’est allé aussi loin

Which roughly translates to:

ERP5 even manage payroll, while any other free software ERP has gone as far

Hey wait. I wrote this module!

And here is their final evaluation (0 is the lowest, 5 the highest note) of all payroll systems for each ERP (from page 88):

As you can see I not only got the first place: I wiped out the competition.

Sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but I was so happy to get this distinction after so many pain trying to transform laws into code that I couldn’t resist… :)

The payroll modules were one of my biggest contribution as a core developer on ERP5. It was capable of producing the paysheets of all Nexedi’s employees. Here is an example:

These modules were so extensive that I wrote a detailed tutorial based on them. As it was the only comprehensive documentation available on ERP5, my work virtually became the ERP5’s bible for developers for a while.

The English translation is available for download. The original French version, titled Développez votre propre ERP grâce aux Business Templates ERP5 has disappeared from the web.

This document was enough of a reference to be cited in a couple of academic papers from 2006 to 2009:

• A comparison of Open Source ERP Systems

• A Research on Corporate ERP Systems used for Supermarket Supply Chain Inventory Management in Turkey

• Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

• Comparatif ERP5 / COMPIERE

The irony is that after leaving the open-source ERP world in 2007, I was recruited by Smile in 2011, the very same company which produced the original white paper. My job? Working full on OpenERP, the direct competitor of ERP5.