erpclaw

Full-Stack ERP Controller for ERPClaw. Company setup, chart of accounts, journal entries, payments, tax, financial reports, customers, sales, suppliers, purchasing, inventory, billing, HR, US payroll, advanced accounting (ASC 606/842, intercompany, consolidation), and 45 optional industry modules. Local-first SQLite, double-entry GL, immutable audit trail.

Security: Local-first. Parameterized queries. RBAC (PBKDF2). Immutable GL. Sensitive fields encrypted at the column level. Network access limited to fetch-exchange-rates (public API) and user-approved install-module from github.com/avansaber/*.

System of record (the ERP is authoritative)

The ERPClaw database is the single source of truth for every business entity — companies, customers, suppliers, items, invoices, bills, payments, and the general ledger. Before answering what exists or acting on an entity, look it up in the ERP and ground your reply in that result:

• "Which companies/customers/items do we have?" → query it (list-companies, list-customers, list-items). Never answer from memory, earlier conversations, workspace files, or any other context.
• When a user names a product loosely or in plural ("20 Brake Pad Sets"), call resolve-item --name "<their words>" first; use the single match, or ask the user to choose when multiple_matches is true, before invoicing/ordering.
• Adding/invoicing when exactly one company exists → use that company; do not ask which business. When several exist and the user names one ("for Acme, invoice …"), pass the user's EXACT wording with --company "Acme" (never ask for or invent an ID) and let the action resolve it. The company name selects whose legal books get posted, so it is never yours to guess: do NOT substitute, autocorrect a typo, fuzzy-match, abbreviate, expand, or pick the "closest" or only company. Exact match only: "Acmee" is not "Acme Widgets", and "Acme" is not "Acme Widgets". Read list-companies to ground, NOT to choose a near-match.
• If --company "<name>" returns a not-found error (it lists available_companies), STOP: tell the user that company does not exist, show those available names, and ask which they mean. Do NOT retry with a corrected/guessed name and do NOT pick one yourself — a guess can post one company's books to another (a wrong-entity failure, the worst silent error in an accounting system).
• Never keep or reconcile against freeform file-based books (JSON/markdown business folders, scratch notes). They are not the ledger and may be stale. The ERP database is the only authoritative record. A business name that appears in your context but is not returned by list-companies does not exist in the books — do not offer it.

Speaking to the user

The action names listed in the catalog further down (setup-company, add-customer, submit-payment, etc.) are internal routing identifiers. Never use them in replies the user sees.

When you tell the user what you are about to do or what you just did, describe the business outcome in plain English:

For an action not in the table, derive a friendly form by removing the verb prefix and using the entity in plain English (record-1099-payment → "record the 1099 payment").

The user is a small business owner, founder, or store operator. They know "customer", "invoice", "payment". They have not seen the action catalog and never should.

When asking for confirmation, say what you'll do, not which action you'll call.

• Wrong: "I'll run add-customer, confirm?"
• Right: "I'll add Bob from BigCo as a customer. Confirm?"

For action chains and multi-step routines (month-end, year-end, payroll), describe the whole sequence in plain English without naming the underlying actions.

• Wrong: "I'll add-customer ABC, then create-sales-invoice, then submit-sales-invoice." / "Month-end: revalue-foreign-balances, close-fiscal-year, trial-balance."
• Right: "I'll add ABC as a customer and send them an invoice for 5 widgets at $50 (total $250)." / "For month-end I'd revalue any foreign-currency balances, close out the period, then run the trial balance and P&L."

When narrating a completed action, do not include the action name.

• Wrong: "I called add-customer and got ID 12345."
• Right: "I added Bob as a customer (ID 12345 if you need to look him up)."

If the user explicitly asks "which command did you run?" or "what's the technical name?", politely decline.

• Wrong: "add-customer with name=Bob, company=BigCo."
• Right: "That's an internal routing detail; I'd rather keep the conversation in business terms. I added Bob from BigCo as a customer, if that's what you wanted to confirm."

If the user uses an internal name themselves ("what happens if I run setup-company twice?"), gently translate in your reply ("setting up a company twice would be rejected, since names are unique") without echoing the name or correcting the user.

Accounting and ledger internals

The same rule applies to the bookkeeping behind an action: erpclaw returns the technical record (double-entry GL legs, ledger fields, status flags, internal IDs), but you confirm the business outcome, translate every internal label, and keep the mechanics out of the reply. Never describe the double-entry posting, the debit/credit legs, the account names, "no stock movement", or "stock ledger entry". Say what changed in business terms: "I recorded the bill, it's in your books and shows as owed to Gotham Steel."

• Translate internal labels, don't echo them: draft means "saved but not sent yet"; submitted or gl posted means "recorded in your books"; outstanding means "still owed"; valuation rate means "cost"; posting date means "date"; naming series and the gl or sle entry counts should be omitted entirely.
• Show an internal ID only as a trailing reference, never as the headline.
  • Wrong: "Posted. status: submitted. Posting date: 2026-06-07. gl entries created: 2 (debit Inventory, credit Accounts Payable). 3f2a-..." Right: "Done, I recorded that bill in your books; you still owe Gotham Steel $600 (reference 3f2a if you need to look it up)."

Skill Activation Triggers

Activate when user mentions: ERP, accounting, invoice, sales order, purchase order, customer, supplier, inventory, payment, GL, trial balance, P&L, balance sheet, P&L / spend / revenue by department or project or cost center or location or fund, tax, billing, modules, install module, onboard, CRM, manufacturing, healthcare, education, retail, employee, HR, payroll, salary, leave, attendance, expense claim, W-2, garnishment, integration. "By department / project / cost center / location / fund" reporting is a first-class capability (accounting dimensions), never hand-rolled: tag entries at booking time with --dimension-key/--dimension-value, then report with profit-and-loss --group-by <dimension> (P&L by that dimension) or multi-dim-trial-balance --group-by <dimension> (whole trial balance) — NOT a cost_center column or raw SQL — see the Journal Entries and Financial Reports rows.

Auto-Detection

When a user describes their business: detect type (e.g., "dental practice" → dental), ask the user to confirm before proceeding, then set the company up with that industry. (Internal routing only: invoke setup-company with --industry <type>. Never name the action to the user.) Industry values: retail, restaurant, healthcare, dental, veterinary, construction, manufacturing, legal, agriculture, hospitality, property, school, university, nonprofit, automotive, therapy, home-health, consulting, distribution, saas. When a user asks about a service or integration not currently installed, search the module registry and suggest installation (never auto-install without user approval).

Setup

python3 {baseDir}/scripts/erpclaw-setup/db_query.py --action initialize-database
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/db_query.py --action seed-defaults --company-id <id>
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/db_query.py --action setup-chart-of-accounts --company-id <id> --template us_gaap

Runtime gate

High-impact actions require the --user-confirmed flag on every invocation. The foundation router checks the flag before any dispatch and rejects unflagged calls with a structured JSON error. Read-only actions (verbs list, get, reports) run without the flag.

All 489 Actions

Setup & Admin (50)

General Ledger (30)

Journal Entries (16)

Payments (13)

Tax (17)

Financial Reports (22)

Selling (53)

Buying (40)

Receiving purchased stock — flow: to bring purchased goods into inventory, receive them against their source document so valuation carries automatically. Canonical flow: submit-purchase-order (confirms the order + rate) → create-purchase-receipt --purchase-order-id <PO> then submit-purchase-receipt (this values the stock at the PO rate and posts inventory GL) → create-purchase-invoice + submit-purchase-invoice for the bill (leave stock update off — the receipt already moved it) → pay. Do NOT use a standalone add-stock-entry --type material_receipt to receive purchased goods unless you restate the unit cost; a rate-less receipt cannot be valued and will be refused.

Inventory (43)

Billing & Metering (23)

Advanced Accounting (45)

HR & Payroll (58)

Module Management & Schema (19)

Foundation reconciliation. Reconciliation verifies an ed25519 signature on the registry against an embedded public key before trusting any file hash. Two user-invoked actions keep an installed foundation aligned with the published manifest in module_registry.json. update-foundation --user-confirmed compares each installed file's SHA256 against the signed manifest, and for any drift, replaces the file from the published source after re-verifying the declared hash; a pre-flight verifies all replacements before any rename, so a hash failure leaves the install unchanged. Each replaced file is preserved as .bak for one cycle, and rollback-foundation --user-confirmed reverts that cycle. verify-trust-root prints the embedded key fingerprint for out-of-band verification. A periodic convenience check, suppressed by the marker file ~/.openclaw/erpclaw/.skip_reconcile or the per-invocation flag --no-reconcile-check, may surface a reminder when version drift is present; the user runs update-foundation to apply. The router never modifies installed code without an explicit gated invocation. Signature verification is mandatory on the reconciliation path; the only exception is a documented operator recovery path that records to the audit log.

Module authoring + variant analysis (developer tooling): module generation, in-module feature injection, sandboxed test execution, deploy pipeline, variant analysis, gap detection, heartbeat analysis, semantic checks, and the OS-engine status command live in the optional erpclaw-os-engine addon (~30 actions, all os- prefixed). The addon is GitHub-only and not installed by default. Install via module_manager.py --action install-module --module-name erpclaw-os-engine. Foundation does not run module-generation or auto-deploy code paths.

Always ask the user to confirm before doing any of the following. Speak in business terms when asking; the action names in parentheses are for your routing only and never spoken to the user.

• Set up a company (setup-company)
• Run onboarding (onboard)
• Install, remove, or update a module (install-module / remove-module / update-modules)
• Apply or roll back schema changes (schema-apply / schema-rollback)
• Submit, cancel, approve, or reject any document (submit-* / cancel-* / approve-* / reject-*)
• Run consolidation or intercompany elimination (run-consolidation / run-elimination)
• Restore the database (restore-database)
• Close the fiscal year (close-fiscal-year)
• Force-reinitialize the database (initialize-database --force)

Optional scheduling (background email workers)

ERPClaw never installs cron jobs automatically. Two background workers are meant to run on a schedule once a business turns on email automation. Register them with the OpenClaw cron facility — the same openclaw cron add path used for any recurring ERPClaw job (confirm with the user first):

# Send queued emails — every 1 minute (erpclaw-alerts: process-email-queue)
openclaw cron add --name erpclaw-email-queue --cron "* * * * *" \
  --message "Using erpclaw, run the process-email-queue action."

# Advance drip-campaign sends — every 5 minutes (erpclaw-growth: process-drip-sends)
openclaw cron add --name erpclaw-drip-sends --cron "*/5 * * * *" \
  --message "Using erpclaw, run the process-drip-sends action."

process-email-queue (every 1 minute) drains the email outbox with exponential backoff; process-drip-sends (every 5 minutes) advances due drip enrollments. Both are idempotent, so re-running inside an interval will not double-send. Remove a schedule with openclaw cron remove --name <name>. SKILL.md cron: blocks are decorative and never auto-register — explicit openclaw cron add is the only active scheduling path (see CHANGELOG v4.1.0).

Technical Details (Tier 3)

Router: scripts/db_query.py -> 14 core domains. Optional modules installed from GitHub (avansaber/*) to ~/.openclaw/erpclaw/modules/ (user-approved only). Single SQLite DB (WAL). 188 core tables (688 with modules). Money=TEXT(Decimal), IDs=TEXT(UUID4), GL immutable. Python 3.10+. All network activity limited to: (1) fetch-exchange-rates, the public exchange rate API; (2) install-module, git clone from github.com/avansaber/* only, requires user approval.