xTuple ERP 3.5 AddS Drop Ship and Time Entry

Open source ERP aims to give SMB distributors, manufacturers and service-oriented businesses increased automation and saves employee time.
Open source ERP specialistxTuple has taken the wraps off version 3.5 of its eponymous enterprise resource planning solution, adding features aimed at saving employee time and cutting costs by automating routine tasks that are often performed manually or by expensive external systems.
Offering Mac-based and open source ERP software for small to midsize businesses (SMBs), xTuple said that version 3.5 continues the company's recent push to add more enterprise-class functionality to the core package, while retaining the ease-of-use for which the company is known.

New 3.5 features include:

• Drop ship purchasing: Now taking a sales order, immediately purchasing the item and having it shipped directly to the customer is fully automated and seamless for distribution companies.
• Expanded support for tooling: Facilitates managing and consuming tools in the manufacturing process.
• Pricing effectivity: Increases the flexibility of the pricing engine with regard to effectivity dates.
• Time and expense management: xTuple 3.5 supports individual time and expense entry, optionally tied to Project Tasks.
• New user-configurable filters in the CRM module: Allows non-programmers to customize the most-often used displays.
• Support for PostgreSQL 8.4 and Qt 4.6.
• Embedded MetaSQL editor: Enables power users to take deeper dives into custom reporting and use conditional data throughout the application.

Andrew Bergin, chief information officer at Minnesota-based Bergin Fruit and Nut Company, sponsor of the pricing effectivity enhancements in version 3.5, noted: "xTuple provides big-company ERP functionality, but makes it easy for smaller, growing companies to see real business benefit quickly. We implemented xTuple in a matter of months, and are having our best year in decades."

Since xTuple's last release in late 2009, over 400 enhancements have been added by the company, its partners and other community members. To date, the xTuple community has over 25,000 members and the PostBooks Edition has been downloaded more than 340,000 times. Additionally, it is consistently ranked among the most active projects on the SourceForge.net open source portal.

"xTuple 3.5 gives distributors, manufacturers and service-oriented businesses improved visibility into company data, increased control over their operations and the ability to make informed business decisions," said Ned Lilly, xTuple's CEO and co-founder. "The continuous involvement of our community of customers, partners and open source users is the key to the ongoing improvement of the product. It's how we're able to add more and more sophisticated enterprise functionality, while keeping the simplicity that SMBs require."

The PostBooks Edition of xTuple ERP is available free of charge under the open source Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), or xTuple's hybrid commercial 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.

The Standard and Manufacturing Editions of xTuple are commercially licensed products with expanded features based on the core PostBooks Edition. All three versions of xTuple run equally well on Mac, Windows and Linux computers and are internationalized with multi-currency, support for multiple tax structures, and multilingual translation packs maintained by the global xTuple open source community.