Among the key new features is a Kitting function to allow distributors to more efficiently sell collections of items, as well as a Multi-Company Financial Consolidation feature which allows companies or groups of companies to report on a single consolidated financial statement.
“While the roots of xTuple ERP are in manufacturing, we’ve seen enormous interest from distribution and retail businesses,” said Ned Lilly, president and chief executive officer of xTuple. “Working with our growing community of users, we continue to broaden the functional scope of the world’s most advanced open source ERP system - while maintaining the simplicity and ease-of-use for which we’re known worldwide.”
The new Sales Order Kitting function enables users to sell kit items on a sales order that automatically explodes to include shippable line item components. The kit components are printed on the sales order pick list, issued to stock and shipped, all accomplished without an intermediary work order. The Sales Order Kitting functionality is available in all editions of xTuple ERP, including the totally free PostBooks Edition.
Other enhancements featured in xTuple ERP 3.1 include:
- Multi-Company Financial Consolidation, which allows users with a multi-company chart of accounts implemented on separate databases to report on a single, consolidated financial statement. The xTuple Financial Reporting Engine synchronizes trial balances across these databases, while child databases maintain company-specific trial balance data and the parent database receives copies of the data from each child.
- Average Costing, perfect for distributors and light manufacturers requiring a streamlined, low-maintenance solution which does not require periodic cost recalculations as does the standard costing system.
- Sales Order Reservations by Location, which expands the existing Sales Reservations functionality available in xTuple ERP to be able to reserve quantities at the location level and print these location allocations on a pick list, reducing the possibility of conflict where items are stored in multiple locations in a warehouse but there is more demand than supply in any one location at a given time.
xTuple ERP PostBooks Edition is the company’s entry-level offering, available completely free and open source, and suitable for small businesses of all kinds. It includes full financials; customer relationship management (CRM); sales and purchasing; financial and ad-hoc reporting; and lightweight inventory, manufacturing and distribution. xTuple ERP Standard Edition is a midrange commercially-licensed offering, which adds advanced inventory control, warehousing, and other features to the core package. It is a good option for distributors, retailers, light manufacturers, and anyone else who would prefer commercially licensed software. The OpenMFG Edition is the premium commercial offering, and is recommended for manufacturing companies in both discrete and batch process production; make to order, make to stock, or mixed-mode; even job shops and engineer-to-order.
The PostBooks Edition is available free of charge under the open source Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), and is consistently ranked among the top ten projects on the SourceForge open source download portal. The Standard and OpenMFG Editions are available under xTuple’s innovative hybrid license, whereby customers and partners have full access to the application source code, and any enhancements made to the product flow back to xTuple for review, quality testing, and possible incorporation into the baseline product.
All xTuple ERP products run equally well on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers, and are fully internationalized with multi-currency, support for multiple tax structures, and multilingual translation packs maintained by the global open-source community. The company also sponsors public discussion forums, a documentation wiki, blogs, and the community issue/bug tracker.