The daily stock report writes itself and lands in your team's chat.

Nothing on this page is a customisation. Every feature described here ships with ERPNext, and most of it is configured by somebody in your office rather than built by us. We are writing it down because it is standard, widely useful, and almost never switched on.

An emailed report is better than a manually compiled one, and it still lands in an inbox with two hundred other things.

The version we actually run is Raven, Frappe's team chat, connected to the same ERPNext. The stock position or the day's sales appears in the channel the team already has open, where somebody can reply to it. We use this ourselves, against our own ERPNext, which is why we are comfortable recommending it.

Two separate mechanisms in ERPNext, and they get confused. Workflow is the states a document moves through and who may move it; the document carries the state, so nobody has to remember where it got to. Notifications are what tells a human something is waiting: a condition on a document (submitted, changed, past a date) triggers a message.

Together they replace the pattern most businesses run on: an email asking for approval, a reply saying yes, and no record of either attached to the purchase order six months later when somebody asks who approved it.

Tasks with an owner and a date, grouped into projects, with timesheets against them if you want costing.

Where this earns its place is not project management for its own sake. A task can be attached to the thing it is about (a customer, a work order, a service job), so the question "what is happening with this order" has an answer in the same system as the order.

ERPNext ships three things that build a dashboard without code: Number Cardsfor a single figure, Charts for a trend, and Dashboardsthat arrange them into one screen. Filters and date ranges are set once and saved.

The figures a director checks daily, on one screen, without asking anybody.

Be concrete or say nothing. The honest measure is the number of hours a week somebody spends compiling something a computer could compile. In most businesses we have looked at, that is one person, one to three hours a day, on daily sales, stock position and outstanding.

The second saving is the one people do not count. A report arriving at the same time every day, in the same shape, means the argument at the monthly meeting is about the business rather than about whose figure is right.

All of the above assumes the data is in ERPNext. If production is tracked in a register and only the invoice reaches the system, an automated report will faithfully report half a picture, on time, every morning.

That is not an argument against automation. It is an argument for fixing the data first, and it is the most common reason an automation project disappoints.

Call +91 98554 31488 and describe the report somebody in your office puts together every morning, and who reads it. Most of the time ERPNext already produces it and nobody has switched on the schedule. That conversation costs you nothing, and it is the one we would rather have first.