I am new to dolibarr and spent all the day for finding out how it works. So far it looks great and I love the level of profession and passion the software is developed with.
But for our business it seems to be a bit more complicated, so I hope anyone of the great community could push me to the right direction:
First of all: We’re renting equipment. But not the usual way so that you have a start and an end date, sign a contract, give it back and get an simple imvoice. But it’s more like a subscription with physical products. That’s why our customers are free to rent as long as they want. So they get a contract, on that basis we’re shipping the item, customers rent (and pay) as long as they want and if they return it, they get a final invoice and get their deposit back. Other option is to buy the item and get a discount about the last 6 paid rates.
Unfortunately, I found out that dolibarr is using physical products which can be sold only and services which allow recurring payments, but are not linked to a physical product in stock. So the BIG BIG questions is:
How can I handle physical items in combination with contracts and recurring payments???
The item can be returned or bought by the customer later. All our contracts have no end dates.
So has anyone an idea how to set up my business? BTW, it should be automated as much as possible, because we have several hundreds of customers, so I definedly need some workflows for automation. In the workflow I didn’t found any option to set up custom workflows. Only some predefined options were available.
To give an example: If a record is added from an external ressource (will be Woocommerce for the moment), a free item based on that request should be selected automatically and be added to a proposal/contract. Send this contract to the customer.
sorry for my late reply. Yes, the recommendation from Altairs is the one I got when I was testing dolibarr for our (long-term) renting business. But while contacting them, they didn’t accept any demonstration or testing before purchasing. That’s why I finally dropped all my testing with dolibarr.
Finally we decided to run our business with odoo, which is as well open-source (community edition).
It is much more bigger in worldwide community and much more grown. So it comes with lots of modules which should be fine for most standard businesses. For our case we hired an odoo developer (which you can find easily worldwide), because after testing lots of rentin modules for odoo (yes, there you can do that!), we found that none of them applies to our exact business model.
odoo is in general more complex if it comes to server setup. For dolibarr you need a simple webspace (even shared works) and a simple mysql DB. For odoo you need an python environment and a postgresql DB. Both of these requirements leads you to a VPS where you manage your operating system, the python environment and DB. And you need to secure the SSL encryption manually.
So, in general let me summarize, odoo is much more powerful and the better option if you want to be able to scale up with your business (some huge companies are using odoo). Dolibarr could be the better option if you have just a small business and want to keep the technical requirements as low as possible.
I guess with lots of customization, there is much more possible in dolibarr, too. But in odoo you get lots of locatizations and code-free configurations from the huge open-source community.
I’m always happy about exchanging experience and knowledge. So feel free to contact me if you want to discuss dolibarr and odoo more deeply.
Hi ksar,
yes and no. You’re right, only core features of odoo are open-source and odoo Enterprise is each year trying to shift new releases to the premium/paid version.
But on the other hand I can tell you that there is a huge community releasing tons of Apps (free or paid without any subscription, just pay and go) for odoo Community edition (CE). The OCA repository is trying to create alternative foss modules for the community. In most cases I was able to find alternatives to my requirements for my odoo CE server.
In any case the OCA and other odoo developers are very vivid in creating and updating modules. This is something I don’t see here in the Dolibarr community (especially in the german community, but this is same to the non existing german odoo community).
For our requirements I finally found a odoo developer who created the needed customizations. It is easy to find odoo developers worldwide, while I don’t know how easily you can find a Dolibarr developer.
apart from features and modules, what I think is an important advantage of Dolibarr is the full and official support of updating/migrating an existing installation to newer releases. An ERP installation is a long term project and I believe it is essential to have a guaranteed upgradability.
And since the Dolibarr project is backed by a non-profit foundation, there is little risk that it will become fully/partially closed-source in the future. Unfortunately, there are several ERP projects which originally were Open Source until they changed their minds and the license, so this seems to also be an important factor.
I agree that the German community is not really big, but I have seen it growing in the recent time. Currently the German Dolibarr e.V. is organizing activities like the Doliday and the DevCamp in Vienna this September. And I have experienced that also the English speaking community is very approachable.
If you need commercial (development) support, there is a worldwide list of many companies that are Dolibarr Preferred Partners plus there are additional companies offering their services without this label.
Anyway, the selection of an ERP solution is always highly individual and everyone has different preferences and priorities. I hope this is an agreeable conclusion to not further deviate from the original topic of this thread
To add to the above, there are a lot of Dolibarr module developers working as freelancers, me included, that can write a custom module to achieve your goals and depending on the job it may not be very expensive and a lot of them are active here (I guess?).
For example, recently I’ve written a module that extends the basic resources module (Dolistore - Resources Extended) that with some modifications and some additional code can achieve what you need.
So no matter whether paid help or not, the community of Dolibarr users and developers will always do their best to help you and guide you if you want to do a change or modification to the software. Don’t have experience with odoo, but from my observation of this forum for all those years been here: almost no one leaves empty-handed
there is a working external module for this rental issue, that adds additional column for rental duration, and updates calculations formula as per below > Total HT = unit price * Qty * duration
check this blog in french for additional informations, just type in google > “Module Location Dolibarr de Doliflex”
