Proof

Where the platform has been proved

A platform that promises to absorb any business process should be judged on the processes it has already absorbed. This page describes what runs on GTSuite today, and where the requirements came from. Client names are withheld deliberately, and everything below is stated in the tense it deserves.

Accounting information, published to the people who need it

Finance departments hold information that many people in the company need to consult and almost nobody can reach: open items, payment schedules, amortisation plans, the position of a customer or a supplier at a given date. The usual answer is a spreadsheet exported by somebody in accounting, out of date the moment it is sent.

The application built on GTSuite reads the accounting system directly and publishes that information as pages anyone authorised can open, with the figures as they stand, filtered and totalled the way the reader needs them.

The interesting part for anyone evaluating the platform is not the application itself, it is how it is distributed. The same application now runs at several companies, on separate installations, with nothing differing between them except the data and the connection settings. There is no per client branch and no per client codebase to maintain. A correction made once is a correction available to all of them.

Technical note: the application definitions are portable between installations, and the connection code carried by the logged in session selects the company. Multi company behaviour is a property of the definitions, not a fork of the software.

District heating, from meter reading to the customer's bill

District heating billing is a good stress test for a platform, because almost none of it is standard. Consumption has to be collected and validated, split across the parts of a plant, indexed against fuel prices, allocated between fixed and variable quotas, and turned into invoices that a customer can check line by line. Different plants and different operators calculate it differently, and the rules change with contracts and regulation.

The system that does this work has been running the billing for years. It is now being carried onto GTSuite, together with a portal that lets each end customer look up their own consumption, invoices and bills instead of phoning the office to ask.

Technical note: the calculation variants are not branches of a program. They are described in the platform and selected per plant, which is what makes several quite different billing models coexist in one system.

Textile and wool: where the requirements come from

The demands that shaped GTSuite did not come from a whiteboard. They came from systems built for the wool and textile trade and used daily for decades: purchasing and auctions, trading, production, logistics, laboratory work, stock, customs, profitability and sales. One of them runs well over 150 forms against a multi entity data model with real time auction handling.

Those systems are the reason the platform is shaped as it is, and they are the benchmark it is measured against: the rule adopted throughout its development is that if something has to be expressed with custom code, the platform is missing a feature. The migration of that world onto GTSuite is under way, with the trading application already prototyped on the new platform.

Where it runs is your decision

GTSuite installations are identical whether they sit on our hosted service or inside your own infrastructure. Both are in use today.

• Hosted by us, if you would rather not run servers and databases.
• On your own server, in your building or in a data centre you already pay for, with your data never leaving it.
• Moved later, in either direction, because the two are the same installation.

This matters for more than preference. Where the data physically sits is often a compliance question, sometimes a contractual one, and it should not be decided for you by the software you chose.

What this tells you

Three quite different worlds, accounting information, energy billing and the textile trade, on one platform, with no custom code separating one installation from the next. If a platform can carry those, the odds are good that it can carry the parts of your business that no package has ever fitted.

The demo is the fastest way to judge that for yourself. Confirm an email address and you can use a live system, read the technical documentation and work through the exercises that build real pages from nothing.