Fynleaf: a white-label franchise platform on ERPNext

The challenge

A franchisor supplying many stores needs each store's books kept separate, wholesale costs hidden from franchisees, and the order-to-delivery cycle between them automated. Its customers also expect to shop from their phones, and a franchise network shouldn't have to build that from scratch.

What we built

• Franchise back office: each franchisee is its own company in one ERPNext instance, with setup wizards for the franchisor, new franchisees and multi-store owners
• Automatic ordering: a store's purchase order becomes the franchisor's sales order, then the invoice, the delivery and the store's stock receipt, with every document linked to its source
• Data kept apart: role profiles keep each store to its own data and hide wholesale prices, set before each user's first login
• Store analytics: income and expenditure, sales by hour and top items, per store
• Point of sale and membership: till setup, a permanent membership number for every customer, South African bank and tax templates, and migration from the previous point-of-sale system
• Customer app for Android and iOS: sign in with a phone number or membership number and a one-time SMS code, browse by department, keep a cart, check out to a saved address and follow the order to the door
• Courier tracking: delivery status from The Courier Guy, shown in the app
• Orders credited to the right store: built to credit online orders to the franchisee where the customer first joined
• Help built in: FAQ, contact, terms and privacy pages in the app, and a helpdesk
• White label: one codebase produces a separate app for each client, with its own name, logo, colours, fonts and store listing. An automatic check rejects colours that fail accessibility contrast and logos that won't read at icon size.

How it works

The back office is a standard ERPNext app: when a document is submitted in one company, the matching draft is created in the other. The customer app never talks to ERPNext directly. A secure service layer handles sign-in codes, payments and caching, and ERPNext exposes only the few actions the app needs. Each client gets its own ERPNext, service layer, app build and store listing from the same code, so a new brand is a matter of configuration rather than a separate project.

1. Store purchase order→
2. Franchisor sales order→
3. Invoice→
4. Delivery→
5. Store stock receipt

By the numbers

• Five automated document steps between franchisor and store
• Three price lists
• Five role profiles
• One codebase for both Android and iOS
• Back office in production; the customer app is in development, with payments moving to a new provider before its first store release