phpBMS Mission

The main mission of the phpBMS project is to provide business management software which focuses on generalized needs of the average company. All too often, CRM, SFA, accounting packages and the like are insufficient or inappropriate for businesses to use. Not only are they expensive, so much so that they are prohibitive to the small business, but they can be overrun with so many features that they can be hard to use. Many of these superfluous features that you pay so dearly for will go underutilized, and you may end up with software that - though it was hard to learn for the simple tasks - still won't perform the way you need it to for the big things. Once the license is purchased and data is being created, the small business is effectively "jailed" into a situation which forces them to run the business the way the software wants them to, rather than the software serving the business.

And that's where phpBMS fits in. Many businesses with basic software requirements will find that phpBMS does everything they need, and at a reasonable price (free!). By keeping this basic functionality as simple as possible, the learning curve for company employees is low. But even if a company finds that it doesn't have everything, phpBMS can still be the solution. Money is much better spent customizing the solid base program that, by default, already has about 80% of the functionality the business requires, rather than purchasing an over-priced and restrictive license for traditional software. The result is software package that does exactly what you want, rather than over paying for functionality you do not need, and still being left with a product that might not do everything that your company requires.

By utilizing an open source license, solid foundational structure, and a module-based design, phpBMS strives to be easy to customize to fit a company's exact needs. Other factors that allow for ease of customization:

• No use of third-party plug-ins such as flash, java apps, or ActiveX controls
• Modularized development that allows customizations to be isolated and concurrently upgraded when new versions of phpBMS are released.
• Robust MySQL data integration allows for external/extra tables to be accessed by phpBMS with little or no code.

Scope

As mentioned above, phpBMS's main modules (which we call the phpBMS core) were designed to have a limited scope of functionality. This is limited to common tasks that most, or all, small to medium sized businesses utilize. This limited scope is crucial to insuring the ease of use of the software and focuses the software without the fear of becoming bloatware. With these ideals in mind, here is the scope of major unimplemented features set as a goal for the initial, and complete version 1.0 release of phpBMS:

• Inventory Control - The ability to track the number of a specific product, and have those numbers change as reflected on orders and purchases
• Purchasing - The ability to track vendors and create purchase orders.

What the Current Scope Does Not Cover

• Client Account Management - The ability to let a client log in to a system to place orders, check statuses, or make direct payments. For security purposes, we feel this should be implemented as a separate application that interacts with phpBMS, and not be part of the phpBMS core.
• eCommerce / Shopping Cart System - Although phpBMS has many "hooks" used to talk to eCommerce applications making it possible to integrate well with them, it will never be part of the phpBMS core.
• Industry Specific Functionality - Any piece of functionality specific to an industry or not conducive to use by a majority of small to medium sized businesses. Rather, these should be implemented as separate modules or customizations, and phpBMS makes it practical to do so.
• Trouble Ticket System - The ability for clients and support technicians to troubleshoot problems, and the ability to track these problems. This is another great candidate for a module.
• Accounting - Although phpBMS will have many tools, reports, and export formats they may link into accounting programs (such as Quickbooks and SQLLedger), phpBMS itself does not "do" accounting.