How to Build a Company Portal & ERP

In this episode of Build it with Tim, we’re building a full application to manage a company’s internal processes from start to finish. Enterprise Resource Planning applications can be bought “off-the-shelf” but typically lack the customization necessary for your business or force you to pay for bulk feature sets that you may never use. When building and ERP on Tadabase - you have full control at all times to design and build the application you’ve always dreamed of.

Before I started working at Tadabase, I built an application using Tadabase for my family business. As a company that worked in the Event industry, there were a lot of moving pieces that needed to be tracked and managed from the initial phone call with a customer to the moment our crews left the job site.

For this build, I’ve broken down the requirements by User Role into basic C.R.U.D. events.

Create, Read (view), Update, and Delete

Admin

Create, update, and delete Users
Create, update, and delete Events
Create, update, and delete Schedules
Create, update, and delete Payroll*
Create, update, and delete Customers
Create, update, and delete Contacts
Create, update, and delete Documents
Create, update, and delete Notes

Employee

Read Events
Read Schedules

Using this as a guide to build our data structure, we can easily determine what Data Tables we’ll need to create first.

Users - default table with every Tadabase application
Events - used to store event information
Schedules - used to create a unique record for an Event + a User
Customer - used to store Customer information
Contacts - used to store Contact information related to a Customer
Documents - used to upload documents for related Events
Notes - used to store notes, comments, and tasks related to Events

* in this build, I opted to not include a separate payroll table because payroll information can be entered and managed on the Schedule record.

Once our Data Structure is complete, the next step is to create pages in the Page Builder to provide access to each of our requirements.

I cover this process in depth in this episode but the basic idea here is to build pages for each of the tables we have in the Data Builder, and set the page security based on which User Role should have access.

For example - the Events page contains a Table Component with the ability to add new events. Referencing our initial requirements, only an Admin should have access to the page.

At the very least, when building a Company Portal or ERP, you should be using the following features in the Page Builder:

• Page Layouts
• Page Security
• Row Visibility
• Edit Links
• Detail Links
• Add New Record Forms
  
  

Ready to dive in? Let’s take a look at this episode of Build it with Tim to see how you can build a full-scale Company Portal and ERP in just a few hours.

In this episode, we’ll learn how build a large scale application to function as a Company Portal or ERP using the entire Tadabase System, including the Data Builder and the Page Builder.

Watch the episode: Build it with Tim - How do I build a Company Portal / ERP?