… 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):

ERP

Evaluation

 TinyERP

★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)

 OpenBravo

☆☆☆☆☆ (0/5)

 Neogia

☆☆☆☆☆ (0/5)

ERP5

★★★★☆ (4/5)

 Adempiere

☆☆☆☆☆ (0/5)

Compiere GPL

☆☆☆☆☆ (0/5)

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:

Payslip generated by ERP5 for a fictional employee, itemising every French social contribution line by line with employer and employee rates, down to net and taxable net

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:

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.

7 archived comments

Comments are closed. These were posted on Disqus, and are archived here.

  1. Dominique

    Kudos!
    Well you're the worst too for the payroll :-)

    1. Kevin Deldycke Author

      @Dom75: hmm... what ? I don't understand the joke... :|

      1. Kevin Deldycke Author

        @Dom75: OK, you just explained your joke by phone. For you, because the payroll I implemented is the only one in the Open-Source ERP market, it's not only the best, but also the worst. Why not, but that's quite far-fetched, as Tiny/OpenERP got a non-zero rating ! :)

  2. Kevin Deldycke Author

    Full disclosure: I now work at Smile on OpenERP ! :)

    1. Kevin Deldycke Author

      Now working for Smile doesn't mean I can't tell the truth: https://twitter.com/kdeldycke/status/114609838771810305 ;)

      But a day after that tweet I feel like a giant troll. Oh well...

  3. tejas

    Hello,

    Hi... you are really a jocker.

    your erp5 is really ugly even your site too....

    Just test all other open source erps are too good.

    1. Kevin Deldycke Author

      @Tejas: read my article again: this blog post was published in 2008 about a white paper written in September 2007.

      Everything has changed since then. I'm no longer a core developer on ERP5 and OpenERP has won the open-source ERP war.

      I now work full-time for Smile.fr, which has won the best European OpenERP partner award this year.

      Hope these facts will moderate your judgment.