Dolibarr, economic management for grassroots and businesses in CommonsCloud.coop

This post is also available in: Català (Catalan) Español (Spanish)

Technologies for economic management are conventionally considered “boring” and are often spoken of as something to be endured with resignation. But many cooperatives, businesses, small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as cultural associations, parents associations, non-formal education groups and NGO’s that need to manage their finances can benefit from a tool that helps them to work in a comfortable and organised manner instead of having to manage with spreadsheets. Dolibarr is a free software tool that can help in these tasks.

The cooperative digital cloud service Commonscloud.coop has incorporated Dolibarr as a pooled tool, for a monthly or annual fee.

Dolibarr is both an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) used to help manage a company or organisation.
An important feature is that it is not installed on your computer but is a web service, to which you can connect from any computer with a user account and password.

It is a freely licensed programme which began to be developed in France in 2003 to resolve the management of membership fees and later added other modules. It is currently available in multiple languages (including English, Spanish and Catalan).

Dolibarr is made in a modular way, its modules can be activated or deactivated according to the needs of each organisation. CommonsCloud includes in its service “ERP manager” a Dolibarr with the most relevant and stable modules.

Some of the things you can do with Dolibarr are the following:

Management of user and group permissions to be able to work in a team. As with the rest of CommonsCloud services, user accounts are common to those used in other contracted tools, with one single password.
Management of quotas and membership data.
Relationship management with “third parties”: customers, potential customers and suppliers.
Store contacts and addresses.
Management of products and services. Prices as well as warehouse and available stocks.
Purchasing management including receiving quotations from suppliers, placing orders, recording receipts f goods, issuing invoices and recording payment.
Sales management: quoting, managing customer orders, dispatching products, invoicing and recording reception of goods. Follow up on revenue opportunities, orders and cash flow.
Accounting of the company or organisation, tracking income and expenses and obtaining balance sheets or statements of accounts.

As it is free software, if there is an IT specialist within the organisation or a contracted IT service, it can be freely installed on its own server, otherwise external management can be contracted. This is the case of CommonsCloud, based on the philosophy that we can pool cloud tools between organisations that are associated and pay for different services with monthly or annual fees. Dolibarr is another tool in the catalogue of services, in this case the “ERP Manager” service.

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