Free ERP software

What you can do without paying

• Product catalogue — items with cost price, selling price, unit and description.
• Stock levels — current quantity per item, updated as goods move.
• Reorder points — a threshold per product that flags when it is time to buy.
• Goods received — recorded against the supplier, with cost.
• Document integration — pull products into quotations, invoices and waybills.
• Web and Android on the same account.

The hidden costs of open-source ERP

Open-source ERP is genuinely powerful and genuinely free to license. Before choosing it, price the parts that are not:

• Hosting — a server that must stay up, be backed up and be patched.
• Implementation — the configuration that makes it match your business. This is where most of the cost sits.
• Expertise — either a consultant or someone internal who becomes the only person who understands it.
• Upgrades — version migrations are projects, not clicks.

For a business with a dedicated IT function this can work out well. For a ten-person distributor, the total cost is usually higher than a subscription, and the risk of a single dependent person is real.

What free ERP will not include

Being straight about scope. A free small-business ERP is not going to give you multi-warehouse transfers, manufacturing bills of materials, batch and expiry tracking, or landed-cost allocation across shipments. Those are real requirements for some businesses, and if you have them you should buy a system that handles them properly.

What it does cover is the situation most small businesses are actually in: one location, a few hundred products, and no reliable answer to what is on the shelf.

Setting up in an afternoon

1. List your top 20 products by revenue. Not everything — the items that matter.
2. Count them. An honest opening quantity is worth more than a tidy guess.
3. Set cost and selling price. This is what makes margin visible later.
4. Set a reorder level — roughly what you sell during your supplier's lead time, plus a buffer.
5. Sell one item through the system — raise an invoice by pulling the product in, and watch the stock move.

Step five is what makes it stick. Until stock changes because you sold something, it is still just a list.

When you will need to pay

The upgrade trigger is not product count. It is needing ERP alongside the rest of the platform — CRM for the customer side, AI Workspace, higher document volumes. At that point ERP is bundled into the Pro plan rather than charged as a separate licence, which for most businesses is cheaper than running three subscriptions.