Orientation
What a DocType is, the four entity kinds, and how to read this site's entity-relationship diagrams.
Start with Concepts — it defines the vocabulary everything else on this site assumes: what a DocType is, the four entity kinds (Master, Transaction, Ledger, Child table), and the Mermaid notation used for every relationship diagram on the site.
Read it in full before moving on; nothing here restates it.
What to notice on your first pass
- The distinction between a Master (independent lifecycle) and a Child table (owned by exactly one parent) drives most of the schema’s shape.
- A Transaction’s
docstatus— Draft, Submitted, Cancelled — is why so many designs favour reversal over in-place edit; stage 5 comes back to this. - Some entities are marked (fw) — they belong to the underlying Frappe framework, not ERPNext itself. Framework entities lists them.
Which release this documents
Everything on this site, including this path, is a snapshot of one upstream release. Check Source version before treating any count or fieldname as current — it names the exact commit and every app in scope, including the separate India Compliance app that layers GST on top of core ERPNext.