ERPNext implementation in phases, priced before you commit

ERPNext is a complete, open-source ERP — accounting, inventory, manufacturing, HR, projects, CRM and more — built on the Frappe framework in Python. There is no per-user licence, the source is yours to read and extend, and the same application scales from a twenty-person trading company to a state programme with half a million records. That changes the economics of an implementation: the budget goes into fitting the system to your business, not into seats.

It also changes who you should hire. Because ERPNext is code rather than a closed product, the implementer needs to be an engineering team, not a reseller. We run a Python and Frappe practice alongside the ERP practice, so the consultants who map your processes sit next to the developers who write the custom app — and nothing is 'not possible' because a vendor's product roadmap says so.

We recommend ERPNext honestly. If your finance team is wedded to Tally reports, we keep the migration reversible until they trust the ledger. If you need an SAP-certified system for a parent company's audit, we say so. Most Indian mid-market companies do not, and pay for it anyway.

Every ERPNext implementation we deliver runs through the same six phases. The first — a fixed-fee discovery and fit-gap study — is the one that decides whether the rest goes well. We interview each function, document the as-is process, map it to ERPNext's standard behaviour, and classify every gap as configure, customise or change-the-process. The output is a costed, phased plan you can take to another vendor if you like; nobody has.

From there we configure a prototype company with your real chart of accounts and a month of real transactions, and walk your team through it before writing any custom code. Customisation and data migration happen next, in parallel; then role-based training and user acceptance testing on your data; then go-live, one module or one site at a time; then a hypercare month where our consultants sit in on your first closes.

• Discovery & fit-gap — process maps, gap register, costed rollout plan (2–4 weeks, fixed fee)
• Configure & prototype — company setup, masters, permissions, workflows on real data
• Customise & migrate — custom doctypes and apps; opening balances and history with reconciliation
• Train & UAT — role-specific sessions, documentation, sign-off scripts per function
• Go-live — module by module or site by site, never everything on one Monday
• Hypercare — a month of on-call support through the first month-end and payroll

The honest answer is that it depends on scope, and the discovery phase exists so that the estimate is a number rather than a range. As a guide from our own projects: a single-company rollout of accounting, buying, selling and stock for 10–50 users typically goes live in 8–12 weeks from kick-off; add manufacturing with quality and traceability, or multi-site operations, and 4–6 months is realistic; a bespoke Frappe platform such as a state-wide programme or a corporate learning system is a product build of 4–9 months, delivered in releases.

Five things set the cost. The number of modules and companies in scope; the depth of customisation (a workflow tweak versus a new doctype versus a whole app); the state of your data and how far back history must migrate; the integrations — banks, e-commerce, biometric attendance, GST suites; and hosting, where Frappe Cloud is the simplest and self-hosting the cheapest at scale. User count matters far less than with licensed ERPs, because ERPNext has no per-seat fee.

Discovery is quoted as a fixed fee, implementations as a fixed price for the agreed scope with change control, and post-go-live support as a monthly retainer. You will not find a rate card on this page because a number without a scope is a guess — tell us about the company and we will send one within a week.

Migration is where implementations quietly fail: an opening balance that doesn't tie out, a stock ledger that starts a week late, a customer master with three spellings of the same name. We treat it as its own workstream. Masters are cleaned and de-duplicated with your team before load; opening balances are migrated as of a cut-over date and reconciled to the last trial balance from the old system; transaction history is brought across only as far back as reporting actually needs, with the rest archived and searchable.

For Tally specifically we extract ledgers, groups, stock items and vouchers, map Tally's group hierarchy onto ERPNext's chart of accounts, and run both systems in parallel for one closing period so finance can compare reports line by line before the old one is switched off. Mohan Impex moved every process off spreadsheets this way, and their inventory accuracy went above 99 % because the migration was reconciled rather than imported.

The Frappe framework is built for extension, and the rule that keeps a system upgradeable is simple: never change core. We add fields with Customize Form and Property Setters, behaviour with Client and Server Scripts, and anything larger as a separate Frappe app in its own repository — with fixtures, tests and a migration path. Upgrading from v14 to v15 then means upgrading the platform and re-running your app's tests, not re-applying patches by hand.

Some of the strongest work we have done on Frappe is not ERPNext at all. UNO MINDA's SAP Champion platform trained and certified 3,000+ employees in its first three months with QR-verified certificates; RKCL manages 5,000+ training centres and 500,000+ students with same-day certificate issuance that used to take two weeks; MOSPI coordinates national statistical surveys with 75 % fewer data-quality errors. Each is a custom Frappe application that reuses ERPNext's users, permissions, workflows and reporting instead of rebuilding them.

We deploy ERPNext three ways. Frappe Cloud is the quickest and includes managed backups and upgrades; a self-hosted bench on AWS, Azure or an Indian data-centre VPS is what most of our manufacturing clients choose for cost and control; and on-premise or government cloud when data residency demands it — the MOSPI platform runs under Government of India data-residency and security requirements. All three get the same Docker-based setup, nightly off-site backups, monitoring and a tested restore procedure before go-live.

After hypercare, most clients keep us on a monthly support retainer that covers user questions, small configuration changes, period-end help and the annual version upgrade. Larger changes — a new module, a new site, an integration — are scoped as small projects. The consultants who implemented the system answer the tickets, which is the point of not outsourcing support.

Our ERPNext work clusters in a few sectors. Manufacturing — BOMs, production planning, quality and traceability, as at Jyoti CNC, where on-time delivery went from 78 % to 94 % and quality rejections fell 40 %. Import-export and distribution — landed cost, duty, multi-warehouse stock and GST, as at Mohan Impex. Government and education programmes — RKCL and MOSPI — where the platform is the programme's system of record. And corporate learning and CSR — UNO MINDA and GRAAM — where a Frappe app replaced registers and spreadsheets with dashboards.

If your company is in none of these, the method is the same; the discovery phase is where we find out how well ERPNext fits, and we tell you plainly if it doesn't. The broader practice — collaboration models, industries and the full Frappe stack — is on the Frappe & ERPNext services page.