CADENCE — Running the Business on ERPNext (business-ops.md)

Frappe Cloud is the first-party managed host, run by Frappe (the makers of ERPNext). It offers a 14-day free trial and two product shapes (Frappe Cloud pricing):

Included on all plans: managed backups (offsite), one-click updates/restores, SSL, monitoring, custom domain, and a "product warranty" (support) (Frappe Cloud pricing). Marketplace-app cost model: paid marketplace apps are billed on top of the hosting plan as their own per-site subscription. CADENCE needs none of these for v1 (stock Accounting/CRM/Selling/ Subscription/Projects suffice), so this line item is effectively €0 — flagging that I could not locate an authoritative per-app price list; verify if a paid app is ever added.

Two viable paths:

Rough resource needs. A single-tenant ERPNext for a solo founder is comfortable at roughly 4 GB RAM / 2 vCPU / 20—​40 GB disk (mirrors the entry dedicated Frappe Cloud shape of 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 25 GB cited above). 2 GB RAM is the bare floor and will swap under any real load; budget 4 GB. Flagging: Frappe does not publish a single authoritative minimum-spec number for self-hosting in the sources reviewed — 4 GB/2 vCPU is a defensible engineering estimate, not a quoted requirement; size up if you run Frappe HR or heavy reports.

Real ongoing cost: essentially the founder’s time plus electricity on already-running Proxmox hardware. The cash cost is marginal; the true cost is operational labour (below).

For a solo founder who already operates Proxmox + Docker, self-host. Rationale:

The honest trade-off: self-hosting moves predictable dollars onto unpredictable founder-hours for backups, monitoring, and upgrades. The escape hatch is real and cheap: Frappe Cloud will import a self-hosted site, so if ops time ever exceeds the fee, migrate. Decision rule: start self-hosted; revisit if backup/upgrade toil exceeds ~2 hrs/month.

ERPNext’s Subscription feature is purpose-built for recurring billing and is the spine of CADENCE’s revenue. Three doctypes interlock (Subscription docs):

How recurring invoicing actually runs: a background scheduler processes all Subscriptions on a recurring interval (the docs describe periodic processing roughly hourly), advances each Subscription’s status, and auto-creates a Sales Invoice when a new period is due. Invoices are submitted automatically by default ("Submit Invoice Automatically"), or left as drafts if you disable that. Relevant controls: Generate Invoice At Beginning Of Period, Generate New Invoices Past Due Date, Days Until Due (payment deadline), Follow Calendar Months (align to month boundaries even when the start date is mid-month), and Cancel At End Of Period (stop billing after the current cycle) (Subscription docs). Cancellation stops future invoice generation immediately (Subscription docs). Flagging: the exact scheduler cadence is described as "every ~hour" in the docs reviewed but the precise cron is not pinned — treat invoice timing as "within the hour," not to-the-second.

This maps cleanly to CADENCE’s decided tiers:

ERPNext splits presales (CRM) from active selling (Selling) (Selling flow). The pipeline:

Lead → Opportunity → Quotation → Sales Order → Sales Invoice (Lead-to-quotation flow).

For self-serve Pro, you can skip the Quotation/Sales-Order ceremony entirely: create the Customer and stand up a Subscription directly — the Subscription emits the Sales Invoices on its own, no per-cycle manual document.

ERPNext has a first-class Dunning doctype: select a customer, Fetch Overdue Payments to pull all overdue Sales Invoices, attach a Dunning Type (e.g. First Notice = no fee; Second Notice = fee + interest), and send the reminder. A Dunning is unresolved on submit and flips to resolved once payment (incl. interest/fees) is recorded via a Payment Entry (Dunning docs). For a low-touch SaaS, define two or three Dunning Types and run them on a light schedule; combine with the Subscription’s Generate New Invoices Past Due Date flag to decide whether billing continues during arrears.

ERPNext supports EU VAT including reverse-charge for B2B via Tax Categories (per customer/ supplier region: EU / domestic / Rest-of-World) and Item Tax Templates mapping the right rate to the right account; reverse-charge is configured by applying the rate to a purchase-VAT account and a negative percentage to a sales-VAT account, and the invoice must carry the legally-required reverse-charge note (secondary, ERPNext config: GitHub/community guidance). Honest scope note: the capability exists and is widely used, but correct EU VAT/MOSS-OSS treatment for cross-border digital services is genuinely fiddly (place-of-supply, B2B vs B2C, reverse-charge wording) — set up the Tax Templates, but get an accountant to validate the configuration before invoicing real EU customers. Do not treat this doc as tax advice.

CADENCE’s products are non-stock service subscriptions (a signed feed). They are Items + Subscription Plans, nothing more. No Bill of Materials, no Manufacturing, no warehouses, no Work Orders. Anyone reaching for the Manufacturing module to model a feed subscription is over-engineering it. Skip it.

The optional future SKU — the CADENCE client preloaded on hardware, paired with a Nitrokey 3C for feed-signing/identity — is the only thing that justifies Manufacturing:

Roadmap and the advisory-authoring cadence live in Projects, not Manufacturing:

What lives where:

Run lean. Enable only:

Defer until hiring: HR/Payroll, Stock/Inventory, Manufacturing (until/unless hardware), Support/Helpdesk (until ticket volume justifies it). Turning these off keeps the workspace uncluttered for one person.

ERPNext Dashboards assemble Dashboard Charts + number cards; a chart can be a simple Count/Sum/Average/Group-By over a doctype, or be backed by a saved Report (Dashboard docs). Reports come in four flavours, from no-code Report Builder (single doctype) up to Query/Script Reports for multi-doctype SQL/Python (Making custom reports). Map the founder KPIs:

Honest gap: ERPNext ships excellent stock financial reports (AR, P&L, Cash Flow) and a usable dashboard builder, but it has no native "MRR" or "churn" SaaS-metric report — those require a custom Query/Script Report aggregating the Subscription/Subscription-Plan data, then pinned to a Dashboard Chart (Dashboard docs; Making custom reports). Budget a small one-time effort to write those two reports; everything else the CEO watches is out-of-the-box. Until those custom reports exist, MRR can be eyeballed from the Subscription list × plan price — adequate at low customer counts.