ERPNext · Raven and Raven AI

Ask “what is the stock position?” in team chat and get the answer out of the ERP.

Team chat inside ERPNext. We run it ourselves, against our own ERPNext.

In use: Ours, against our own ERPNext
Licence: Open source, AGPL. No licence fee
Not shipped yet: Push notifications, SSORaven's own listing
Frappe Flow: Pre-release. We do not deploy it

Raven

Raven is team chat (channels, direct messages, files, a mobile app) built on the same Frappe Framework as ERPNext. That last part is what makes it interesting: the chat and the ERP are not two systems bolted together.

Documents from ERPNext can be shared into a channel with a preview. A document event can trigger a message. Workflow actions can be performed and documents printed from inside the chat. Raven AI adds agents that answer questions and run multi-step tasks, built without writing code.

The chat

Take the AI out and Raven is still a working team messenger, and most of what a business gets from it in the first month is here rather than in an agent.

Channels at three levels of access. Private channels are member-only. Public channels let anyone read and only members post. Open channels are readable and postable by the whole organisation. That is how a purchase negotiation stays closed while the shop-floor channel stays open.
Direct messages, one to one, and a conversation with yourself, which is where notes go.
Messages that are not plain text. Formatting, highlights, links and code blocks. Drag a file in and most types preview inside the app. Edit, copy or delete a message, reply inline, react with an emoji.
Finding it again. Bookmarks collect in a saved-messages channel.⌘K, or Ctrl+K on Windows, searches channels, people, messages and files across every channel.
A native mobile app.

Inside the Desk

Raven runs inside the ERPNext Desk, so the conversation happens in the same window as the books rather than in a tab beside them. Send a message carrying a link to a document and that message also appears on the document's own timeline. The argument about an invoice is attached to the invoice, instead of sitting in somebody's sent items.

Not shipped yet

Push notifications. The vendor's own page lists them as still to come. Today the mobile app is one you open, not one that taps you on the shoulder.
Identity management. SSO, two-factor, magic-link login, session timeouts and IP-based login restrictions are listed by the vendor as next.

If one of those is a requirement rather than a preference, ask us where it has reached before you build a plan on it.

Our own instance

Our own team uses Raven, connected to our own ERPNext. That is the only claim on this page we can make without qualification, and it is the one worth making. An AI pitch from somebody who does not use the thing themselves is worth very little.

What an agent can answer

An agent connected to your ERPNext answers the questions whose answers are already in the data.

Question in chat“Which invoices are past due?”
AgentActs for a user, sees what that user sees
Your ERPNextStock, what a customer owes, work orders
AnswerIn the same channel

It reads the live system, not a copy, so it can also create a record or move a document through a workflow.

The limits

It knows what ERPNext knows. If production is tracked on paper and only the invoice reaches the system, no agent can tell you the production position.
It is only as good as your permissions. An agent acting for a user sees what that user sees. Set up carelessly, it becomes a way to ask questions somebody should not be able to ask.
It is not a forecasting tool. “What is the stock position” is a good question for it. “What should I buy next month” is a judgement, and an answer that sounds confident is worse than no answer.
Ambiguous phrasing gets ambiguous answers. “Sales this month” means three different things in most businesses. The teams that get value from this agree what the words mean.

The right test is not an impressive question in a demonstration. It is whether it answers your five most-asked questions correctly, every time, on your data. Ask any vendor, us included, to prove that with your own numbers.

Scheduled reports and questions

Auto Email Report and dashboards push information out on a schedule. Raven answers questions when somebody asks them. Most businesses need the first before the second.

The pattern we run: the daily figures arrive in a channel automatically, and when somebody wants to know something the report does not cover, they ask in the same place.

Frappe Flow

Frappe is building Flow, its own direction for native AI agents inside the Frappe platform. It is pre-release.

We do not deploy it, and nothing on this page is Frappe Flow. It is worth knowing about because it is where the platform is heading. It is not something you can buy from us today, and any partner presenting it as a deliverable is selling something that does not exist yet.

What it is not

It is not a chatbot on your website talking to customers. It is not a replacement for reports. And it is not a reason to implement ERPNext: if the ERP is not in place and trusted, an agent on top of it answers confidently from bad data, which is worse than the spreadsheet.

Questions

Where does my data go when I use Raven AI?

Raven itself runs on your own Frappe instance. What leaves it depends on which model an agent is set up to call. We can tell you exactly how ours is configured, and we will configure yours to a decision you make rather than a default.

Does Raven need an internet connection?

Raven runs on a server, so the people using it need to reach that server. On your own network that can be entirely internal; on Frappe Cloud it is over the internet. An agent that calls a model hosted elsewhere needs a route to it, so an entirely offline deployment constrains which of these features you can have. Raise it early.

What does Raven cost?

Raven is open source under the AGPL, so there is no licence fee. The costs are hosting, the setup work, which we quote per project, and whatever an agent's model provider charges. That last one is not ours to quote: it depends on how much you use it, and anybody giving you a flat annual figure before knowing your usage is guessing.

Talk to us

Call +91 98554 31488. We will show you Raven working against our own ERPNext, including the questions it gets wrong, and you can decide from that rather than from a slide.