An ERP you can ask questions to
Dolibarr is an open-source ERP: clients, suppliers, quotes, invoices, payments and catalogue, with no per-user licence. The interesting part is not installing it — anyone can do that — but what you can build on top of it.
We run BAI’s management on Dolibarr, and we have built a bridge so you can query it in plain language. By typing «how is the business doing» you get, in one second, the client and supplier portfolio, invoiced amounts, payments received, outstanding balances, overdue items with the number of days late, and the status of open quotes. No need to open the ERP, export to a spreadsheet, or wait for someone to put together a report.
This is not a prepared demonstration. It is the tool we use to look at our own accounts every day.
The part nobody talks about: writing
Connecting an artificial intelligence to your ERP sounds good until you think about what happens if it makes a mistake. A model that can issue invoices is a model that can issue invoices incorrectly, to the wrong client, for the wrong amount.
That is why our bridge does not write. It proposes, and a person approves. The circuit is as follows:
- The AI prepares a proposal and shows the exact requests it would execute. No vague “I’m going to create a quote”: you see the entire quote before it exists.
- You approve or reject, and any rejection includes a written reason.
- Only then does it execute.
Proposals are archived in four folders — pending, approved, rejected, and failed — so there is always a record of what was proposed, what was approved, and what went wrong.
Two users, not one
Underneath there are two separate users within the ERP. The one the AI uses for reading has twenty-eight read permissions and zero write permissions: even if it wanted to, it cannot touch anything. The write user is used solely by the approver, and has a whitelist of nine operations: creating third parties, contacts, quotes, and price requests. No validating, no sending, no deleting, no invoices, no banks.
The difference from «we have configured permissions» is that here the limit exists in two places at once: in the code, which has no write operations, and in the ERP’s own permissions. For it to fail, both would have to be breached.
What the guarantee covers
We are equally clear about the limitation. This protects the ERP pathway; it does not turn the entire server into a safe. Anyone with administrator access to the server still has administrator access to the server, and could read the write key from outside the circuit.
To close off that route as well, the key can be encrypted with a password that only the owner knows and that must be entered for each approval. We prefer to explain where the guarantee ends rather than sell you one that does not exist.
Who it makes sense for
For those who already have an ERP and never look at it. The data is in there, but extracting it takes so long that decisions end up being made from memory. The problem here isn’t the ERP: it’s the distance between the data and the question.
For those who pay per-user licences and have more people who need to view than people who need to write. Asking how the month is going shouldn’t cost a licence.
For anyone managing invoicing in a spreadsheet who has reached the point where a mistake costs money, or where no one knows which version of the file is the right one.
For those who have the CRM on one side and invoicing on the other. There, the work isn’t about changing anything: it’s about connecting them. We cover this on the bespoke CRM page.
When not to
When the current ERP works and the team knows it well. Migrating an ERP is expensive, slow and risky. If yours does its job, the right conversation is about connecting it better, not replacing it.
When what’s missing is a process, not a tool. An ERP doesn’t organise a disorganised company: it reflects it. If nobody knows who approves an expense, the ERP won’t decide that.
When the source data is dirty. Migrating a catalogue with outdated prices and duplicate customers produces a new system with the old errors — and one that looks reliable on top of it.
Questions we get asked
Is Dolibarr suitable for a small business? Yes, and it’s where it makes the most difference, because the per-user cost of the alternatives weighs heavily when the team is small. What needs to be planned carefully is who maintains it.
Can it connect with what we already use? It has a programming interface, so yes in most cases. What determines the answer is not Dolibarr: it is whether the other tool allows its data out.
Is it safe to let an AI read the billing data? Reading and writing are different risks. Reading, with a user who has no write permissions, is equivalent to giving access to a report. Writing is what needs to be fenced off, and that is why it does not write here.
What if the bridge collapses? The ERP keeps working as normal. The bridge is a layer on top: if it disappears, you lose the convenience of asking questions, not the management.
How it starts
With an audit of what’s already in place: which system you use, what data it holds, which data is clean and which is not. That tells us whether the way forward is to migrate, connect, or simply add a query layer on top of what already works. More often than not, it’s the third option — and the cheapest.
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