This practical book offers a comprehensive understanding of ADempiere, and takes a look at the main features by way of developing and enhancing a sample case study from concept to deployment. This book will help you model complex business processes with ease.

You will learn to install ADempiere, followed by configuring the company structure and the initial client setup. You can start working with ADempiere immediately because this book will get you up and running quickly, and assumes no prior knowledge or experience of working with ADempiere. ADempiere 3.4 ERP Solutions enables you to: set up the accounting parts, define the prerequisite data, learn about product and price management, and perform procurement and sales activities. When you read the book, you'll understand the concept behind the ADempiere workflow and the important function of managing inventory. Activities such as making user-defined financial reports, procedures for importing data, and security considerations will be covered in detail, and you will also partly learn about the application dictionary configuration.

ADempiere generates accounting facts or journals automatically. In this book, you will understand the impact of these accounting facts. This book will provide you with a comprehensive study of how to easily implement ADempiere and make the best use of this open source ERP system.

To understand the content of this book thoroughly, it is suggested that readers learn and practice the topics sequentially from Chapter 1 through Chapter 10. The remaining chapters can be read and implemented as references.

In Chapter 1: ADempiere Installation, you will be introduced to the hardware requirements, obtaining ADempiere and prerequisite applications, installing and setting up PostgreSQL databases, applying patches, and verifying the ADempiere server and client. Throughout the book, we will use Microsoft Windows as the operating system.

In Chapter 2: Exploring the ADempiere Client and Performing Tasks, you will learn the connection aspect of ADempiere, how to identify the ADempiere version, predefined user IDs, standard format of the ADempiere client user interface, and standard command and functions to perform tasks (including Record Info and the field context menu).

In Chapter 3: Exploring Company Structures and the Initial Client Setup, you will create and map a fictitious apparel company structure. In this chapter, you will be introduced to standard ADempiere company structures, preparing chart of accounts which are required during the initial client creation, creating a new client (company), and finally, you will set up and review organizations, warehouses, and locators. You will also be introduced to Accounting Schema, Calendar Year and Period, and the Accounting Processor features of ADempiere.

In Chapter 4: Setting up Master Data and Knowing its Accounting Configuration, before you start working with ADempiere, you need to set up some master or reference data in the system. For all of the basic or data references, it has a standard accounting configuration. This chapter shows you how the accounting related configuration takes part. With this information, we can configure and alter the default account for an account related with master or references data. With this basic accounting configuration, you will be introduced to managing the customer and the vendor (business partner), managing company financial management including the company bank and cash books. We conclude this chapter with managing currencies, price management, and product management.

In Chapter 5: Procurement Activities with the prerequisites and preconfigured data at hand, you will continue with the creation of a sample procurement flow. Before producing finished goods in the apparel company, we will define the raw materials required (to produce these finished goods). Then you will learn how to accomplish an order requisition, purchase order, material receipt, vendor invoice, vendor payment, and also how to reconcile a bank statement. To learn the General Ledger journal created, we will perform some tasks and generate the accounting facts.

In Chapter 6: Landed Costs, Production, and Sales Activities, you will be explained landed cost (for example, we show how to handle transportation charges), which is allocated and assigned to raw materials. You will configure the bill of material and learn how to manufacture finished goods. With the available finished goods, you will create quotations, sales orders, shipments, invoices, AR receipts, and also reconcile a bank statement. In this chapter, you will also learn how the General Ledger journal is automatically generated by the ADempiere system.

In Chapter 7: Accounting Information and Configuration, you will learn about the central accounting configuration in ADempiere. You will learn how to manage the Account Element (list of company accounts). You will also learn the Accounting Schema in more detail, and will have a hands-on experience of what the effects of modifying the configuration are. An example of how to avoid the Intercompany Due/To journal, avoid the product inventory clearing journal, commitment accounting, and configuring GL distribution will also be shown. At the end of this chapter, Product Cost will be explained.

In Chapter 8: Managing Inventory, you will learn about the various product attributes (for example, registering lot number, color, and so on) and how to work with these attributes. This chapter will guide you through the setup of attribute information, for both raw materials and finished goods. We will continue our discussion with managing internal use of the inventory, managing physical inventory that can be used to perform stock counting, and a way to migrate the existing material. We'll also discuss about how to perform inventory movement with or without creating a confirmation while receiving the material.

In Chapter 9: A Dempiere Workflow, you will learn about how all the ADempiere documents, such as Purchase Requisition, Purchase Order, MM Receipt, and so on, implement the workflow by default. We'll discuss the workflow concept and give some examples on how to implement document process, document value, and general workflow. Through these examples, we'll guide you on how to perform the approval procedure with the help of the document process workflow. You can notify certain people through e-mail if needed. While running a document workflow, we can monitor the workflow progress or even cancel the workflow. You will be guided on how to perform these tasks.

In Chapter 10: Reporting Management, you will be introduced to the Reports and Print features. This chapter will explain what a print format is and how to set up a default print format for a document such as Purchase Order. You will also be informed about how the ADempiere window finds its print format template. You will learn how to customize standard reports by altering the logo, header layout, and detail layout. As an organization has its unique list of accounts, we will conclude this chapter by showing how to create and configure our own financial reports, which can be used to measure the organization's performance.

In Chapter 11: Importing Data, you will learn about the importing mechanism through ADempiere. This will involve activities, such as determining import loader format, preparing the data source, loading the data, and conclude with the importing activities. Based on the predefined loader format, you can practice preparing source files and importing business partners, products, currency rates, GL journals, Orders, Invoices, Inventories, and Bank Statements.

In Chapter 12: Implementing Security, you will finish this book by learning how ADempiere security works. You will be guided through managing user IDs and creating roles. While constructing a role, you will see the various attributes involved, such as access all orgs, maintain change log, and so on. Here, you will learn how to assign rights to access a window, identify a process, and give rights to it, how to register document access, and manage form access. Then, with an example, we will show you how to perform the access security rule for records, how to restrict access to tables, columns, reports, and export facilities. We will conclude this chapter by showing you the process of obscuring information in ADempiere.

ADempiere is an open community. Wherever you are and whatever is your expertise, you can join us through our Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel. You can access this website [1] to access our IRC channel. Enter your nickname and set #adempiere as the channel. You can meet many ADempiere developers, consultants, or end-users around the world and say hello to them.

Moreover, there is a forum [2] available, which can be used to find any information and to express your interest. There are some groups such as Functional-ERP, Functional-Financials, and Help that can be used to share and answer your ADempiere-related questions. When posting any issues through our ADempiere forum, make sure to check the aim of the group created. For example, Functional-Financials will be dedicated to discuss any issues related with Finance and the Accounting parts of ADempiere. When asking any issues through the ADempiere forum, it is wise to check out our friendly rules [3].

So, don't wait! Join us now.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

c:\>java -version
java version "1.5.0_17"Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition
(build 1.5.0_17-b04)Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_17-b04, mixed mode, sharing)

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Although this window has Requisition as its name, you need to ensure that you are using Purchase Requisition as the Document Type of the ADempiere document".

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