Money — Two Architectures Under One Brand

Money has been in the Czech and Slovak markets long enough to have raised two generations of product, and it has earned its position in both. Keeping two tax codes current across two localisations, on two separate technology bases, while the filing rules change every year, is a substantial and unglamorous commitment — and Seyfor has met it. The result is a large installed estate of well-kept books in both countries, which is good raw material.

At a glance

What Money is

Money is a family of Windows business systems that run the financial and operational books of a company under Czech or Slovak accounting law. Seyfor describes the smaller product as an economic system and the larger one as an enterprise information system, and both descriptions are accurate.

The work in either line is organised around the statutory books. Issued and received invoices. Bank and cash. Internal documents. Stock and orders. Fixed assets. Payroll. Everything posts to the ledger under the rules of the jurisdiction the build is localised for, and everything files electronically from inside the application.

That localisation is the real product. The Czech build handles Czech VAT, the VAT control statement (kontrolní hlášení), the recapitulative statement and electronic submission. The Slovak build handles Slovak VAT, the VAT control statement (kontrolný výkaz DPH), the summary statement and eKasa for cash takings. Money ERP adds an international VAT module that carries registrations in other EU member states, including Slovak filings from a Czech installation. None of this is visible in a demo and all of it is expensive to maintain.

For a business that has to be correct with the tax authority, wants stock and payroll in the same place, and wants a Czech or Slovak vendor answering the phone, Money is a well-judged answer at both ends of its range.

The two product lines

Most Money articles treat S3 and S5 as two rungs of one ladder. They are not. They are two different products with two different technology bases, sold to two different buyers, and the choice between them determines more than price.

Money S3 is the accounting-led product. Its data lives in a per-entity data directory rather than a database server, network operation is a file share or a terminal session, and Seyfor recommends against putting the data on network-attached storage. The budget tiers — Start, Basic, Economy, Advanced, Unlimited — control which modules are switched on and how many documents and entities a licence allows. Start is free and capped to one entity. Advanced is the accounting-only configuration. Unlimited is the full set with stock and payroll. Optional modules add the point-of-sale till, the API, the XML exchange in its professional form, accounting and stock analyses, the practice-to-client document exchange, and the background scheduler.

Money S4 and Money S5 are the upper line, which Seyfor now markets under the umbrella name Money ERP. Both run client-server on Microsoft SQL Server 2016 or later, with SQL Server 2022 recommended and any edition from the free Express through to Enterprise supported. Money S4 is the modular configuration: you choose from eight base modules and roughly thirty optional ones, and deployment is fast because nothing is written. Money S5 is the same platform with bespoke development on top, for companies whose processes genuinely differ. The transition from S4 to S5 is a change of contract rather than a migration.

The practical consequence is the one worth planning for. Reporting against Money S4 or S5 has a database server underneath it, so an extract can be incremental, scheduled and invisible to the people working in the system. Reporting against Money S3 works from the API or from a controlled copy of the data directory instead. Both are entirely workable, and we do both routinely. But if reporting is going to matter to you, the S3-to-Money-ERP decision is worth taking with the reporting question in the room, not only the licensing one.

Who Money fits

Sole traders and micro companies. Single-entry bookkeeping (daňová evidence in the Czech build, jednoduché účtovníctvo in the Slovak one), invoicing, a VAT return. Money S3 in a low tier is the correct tool and there is nothing here that needs improving.

Established small companies. Twenty to a hundred people, double-entry bookkeeping, stock, payroll, one legal entity. Money S3 Unlimited covers this well. What these companies usually want next is not a different system — it is a management view of books Money is already keeping correctly.

Accounting and tax practices. Money S3 holds an unlimited number of agendy on most tiers, and the practice-to-client modules move documents between the client and the bookkeeper without rekeying. Practices are among the most concentrated and most loyal Money users, and increasingly they are the ones asking whether they can offer clients reporting on top of books they already keep well.

Growing distributors, e-commerce operations and project businesses. This is Money ERP’s market: stock across several warehouses, order and dispatch workflow, e-shop connectors, EDI with the retail chains, service and warranty handling, job costing. Money S4 covers most of it as configuration, and Money S5 covers the rest as development. This is genuinely further up-market than an accounting-led product reaches.

Groups that grew sideways. A Czech operating company on Money S4, a Slovak subsidiary on Money S3, a third entity on something else entirely because that is what its market used. Each choice was correct locally. What nobody owns is the view across them — and this is the situation in which Money most often reaches us.

One further pattern is worth naming. Seyfor is a large CEE software group, and Money sits alongside iDoklad for invoicing, Vario and Byznys as separate ERP products, and Vema for HR and payroll. A Money client is therefore quite often already inside a Seyfor estate, running two or three of those products in different parts of the business. That is a coherent estate, and it is still several data sets rather than one.

What Money holds — and why it is good material

Before the reporting question, the asset is worth stating plainly.

Money data is clean, and it is clean for a structural reason. Statutory obligation enforces a discipline that voluntary data entry never does: the VAT return has to reconcile, the control statement has to tie back to documents, the ledger has to balance. A Money data set kept properly by a competent accountant is complete to document-line level, internally consistent, and stable across years. That data quality is not an accident and it is not typical.

It is also richer than most users exploit. Both lines carry what Seyfor calls controlling variables — cost centre (středisko, stredisko in the Slovak build), job (zakázka, zákazka) and activity (činnost, činnosť) — and these can be applied at document and line level. They are exposed for both reading and writing through the API, which matters more than it sounds: it means the dimensions are first-class data rather than a print-time attribute. Where they have been used consistently, they carry most of what real profitability analysis needs. Where they have been used partially, they are still a foundation worth building on.

Money ERP adds depth on top of that: stock movements by warehouse and batch, order and dispatch history, service records, CRM activity, contract-driven invoicing. All of it sits in one SQL database per company, in structures that behave predictably.

What sits outside Money’s scope

Money is scoped to one accounting entity at a time. That is a design decision rather than an omission, and for its core user it is the right boundary.

The view across entities. One data set per accounting entity means a group of four companies is four Money data sets, whichever line they run. There is no shared chart of accounts across them and no group ledger, so intercompany matching and currency translation happen outside the system. Seyfor’s own material for Money S5 upgraders refers to reporting tools that can merge subsidiaries’ statements, and where that fits, it is worth exploring with your partner. It remains an in-system report over one platform rather than a group layer over a mixed estate.

The view across systems. Money has no opinion about whether revenue in your e-commerce platform matches revenue in the ledger, or whether headcount in your HR system matches the payroll run. This is worth saying plainly: no ERP does this. Not Money, not Business Central, not SAP. Cross-system truth is a layer above every transaction system, which is the point we make at more length here .

The management view. The statutory chart of accounts exists to satisfy the tax authority and does that job well. It is not built to answer which customers make money after cost to serve or what did that job cost against quote. Money’s own reporting is capable within scope — the Business Intelligence module in Money ERP builds pivot analyses over a direct SQL source or an Analysis Services cube, and there is an optional Power BI module besides. Neither is a governed semantic model that a dashboard or an AI assistant can query across a group and across systems.

None of this is a reason to change system. It is a reason to add a layer.

How we elevate it

Getting the data out is the routine part, and Money gives us more routes than most systems in these markets. On Money S4 and S5 our default is a direct read-only extract from the SQL database, which Seyfor itself names as a supported integration route. Both lines also expose a GraphQL API secured with OAuth 2 — an unusually modern choice for this segment, and a good one, because it lets us request exactly the fields we need rather than pulling whole documents. On Money S3 that API reaches the ledger and cash journals, the chart of accounts, documents, stock cards and the controlling variables. Where the API module is not licensed, we fall back to XML data exchange or a file-level read against a controlled copy. Read-only throughout. Nothing is written back, and users notice no difference in how the system performs.

What happens next is the Money-specific work.

A management chart of accounts alongside the statutory one

The statutory chart keeps doing its job. We map it to a second structure built to answer management questions — revenue by what you actually sell, cost by what you actually control, margin at the level you actually make decisions. This matters more in a Money estate than in a single-system one, because a group running Money S3 in one entity and Money S4 in another will have two charts that grew independently and agree only by coincidence. Mapped once, versioned, owned by a named person, reviewed at each close so it does not drift.

The controlling variables, put to work

Středisko, zakázka and činnost are where profitability analysis lives, and because Money exposes them through the API rather than only in print layouts, we can audit them properly. We check how consistently they have been used across history, surface where coverage is thin, agree the rules for filling them going forward, and encode those rules as validation so the discipline holds. Money ERP clients often have a fourth dimension available through the projects module; where it is in use, it goes into the same structure.

One view across every entity and every system

Each Money data set becomes one entity in a common data model — S3 alongside S4, S4 alongside S5, and any of them alongside a different ERP entirely, an e-commerce platform, a payroll system or a spreadsheet. All produce the same standardised output. Group reporting in any currency, with drill-down from a consolidated total back to the Money document that produced it. This is routine rather than aspirational: we work with 70+ companies across 11 countries, on 12+ different ERP and accounting systems. See Group Reporting & Consolidation .

On the governed layer, the rest is the platform doing its standing job: daily reconciliation against the ledger so the close confirms rather than rebuilds, a semantic model that Power BI and AI can both query reliably , and your business context accumulating so answers get sharper the longer it runs.

What becomes answerable

The clearest way to describe the difference is to list what a Money client can ask afterwards.

• Which customers are actually profitable, after delivery and service cost — not just gross margin on the invoice line?
• What did that job cost against what we quoted, while it is still running?
• What is group EBITDA in EUR, when one entity runs Money S3 and another runs Money S4?
• Which product lines earned their warehouse space this year?
• Why did overhead move this month, ranked by the cost lines that moved most?
• How much cash is tied up in stock that has not moved in six months?
• Where does the reported number differ from the booked number, and why?

Every one is answered from data Money is already holding. The information was there. What was missing was the structure to ask.

What it takes, and what does not change

Connection in days. First reports in the first week. For a single-entity Money client on the S4 or S5 line, the connection is a read-only login and the first governed reports follow inside a week. A full build — management chart of accounts, dimension repair, consolidation across several entities, the reporting suite — runs in phases over the following months. The distinction matters, and we would rather be precise about it than promise a finished model in a fortnight.

What we need from you: an NDA, read-only credentials, and a conversation about what the numbers should mean.

What does not change: Money stays your system of record. Your accountant keeps working the way they work. No migration, no data cleanse project, no retraining, nothing written back.

Read-only access throughout. Your data stays in an EU-hosted Azure environment, aligned with ISO 27001 and GDPR, governed by you.

When Money is eventually replaced

Some Money S3 clients move up to Money S4 or S5, which keeps them inside the same vendor and the same support relationship. Others leave the family altogether, usually because they have outgrown the scope rather than because anything went wrong.

Because the governed layer sits above the ERP, only the connection changes. The data model , the reports, the dashboards and the consolidation logic stay as they are. Clients who built the layer first find the migration measurably easier, because they can prove the new system’s numbers against the old system’s numbers from day one — and they keep their reporting history through the change rather than starting again. That applies to an S3-to-S4 move as much as to a change of vendor.

This is not a theoretical claim. When JING Tea replaced its operational stack, the reporting layer carried through the change unaltered — the systems underneath moved, the numbers and the reports did not.

Money in the regional context

Money is one of several capable systems serving these markets. Each gets its own article in the series .

From a data-layer perspective the choice matters less than it appears. Each of these becomes an entity in the same governed model, which means the ERP decision can be made on operational fit rather than on reporting fear. The full matrix — including the Polish stack — is on the series hub .

Frequently asked questions

Do we need to replace Money to get proper management reporting? No, and we would usually advise against it. Keep Money for what it does well — statutory correctness, VAT, local compliance, clean transaction capture — and build the reporting layer above it. Replacing a working ERP to solve a reporting problem is an expensive way to solve the wrong problem.

Is Onetribe a replacement for Money? No. Money remains your system of record and your team keeps using it exactly as they do now. We read from it, never write to it. If you change ERP later, the reporting layer stays.

Is Money an ERP or accounting software? It depends which line you mean, and that is the useful answer rather than an evasive one. Money S3 is an accounting-led economic system: ledger, invoicing, stock, assets, payroll and a till, which is ERP scope for a small business but not ERP depth. Money S4 and Money S5 — marketed together as Money ERP — are a genuine modular mid-market ERP with warehouse, order, dispatch, EDI, CRM, service and project functionality, and Money S5 adds bespoke development on the same platform.

What database does Money use? It depends on the line. Money S4 and Money S5 are client-server and store data in Microsoft SQL Server 2016 or later, with SQL Server 2022 recommended; any edition from Express to Enterprise is supported. Money S3 uses a file-based data store, with one data set per accounting entity held in a data directory rather than on a database server.

Can Money connect to Power BI? Yes, and Seyfor sells an optional Power BI module for Money ERP that does capable work within one company. For a group, the practical route is a read-only extract into a governed model, with BI reporting on the model rather than on Money directly — the tables are transactional by design, and the definitions need to live somewhere that survives a version upgrade. Reading this way does not slow Money down: on S4 and S5 we read incrementally on a read-only SQL login, and on S3 only through the API or from a controlled copy.

Can Money consolidate several companies? Not as a group ledger. Each accounting entity has its own database or data set on both lines, which is the right design for the market Money serves. Seyfor’s material for Money S5 mentions reporting tools that can merge subsidiaries’ statements within the platform; that is useful where every entity runs Money, and it does not address a mixed estate. Consolidation across different systems is a layer above Money, and it is the most common reason multi-entity Money users come to us.

Does Money have an API? Yes — both lines expose a GraphQL API over HTTP, secured with OAuth 2, sold as an optional module. Reads are real time; writes queue and process asynchronously. GraphQL is a better fit for reporting than a fixed REST surface, because we can request precisely the fields the model needs. Money ERP publishes developer documentation at developer.moneyerp.com; Money S3 developers request an application ID from Seyfor and browse the schema directly.

Is Money’s own BI enough? For one company, with finance users comfortable in a pivot table, the Business Intelligence module does real work and is worth using — it reads either directly from SQL or from an Analysis Services cube, so it scales sensibly with data volume. Where it runs out is across entities and across systems: group definitions, cross-system reconciliation , and a model an AI assistant can query reliably. If Money is your only system and one company is your whole business, start there. On AI: Seyfor publishes no assistant and no MCP endpoint for Money, and the GraphQL API is the surface an AI connection would be built on — building one is not the hard part. The hard part is that a connected assistant inherits Money’s raw structures with no ruling on definitions, which is why AI fails on raw ERP data and why we point assistants at the governed layer instead.

Official Money resources

• Money S3 — Seyfor Czech Republic
• Money S3 — Seyfor Slovakia
• Money ERP — Money S4 and Money S5
• Money S3 API documentation for developers
• Money ERP developer documentation
• Money S3 technical requirements
• Money ERP online help, including technical requirements
• Money ERP Business Intelligence module
• Kontrolný výkaz DPH in Money — Slovakia

Onetribe is not a Seyfor partner or reseller. We build the governed data layer above your ERP, whichever ERP that is.

Next steps

• Every source system we connect — the series hub, with the full matrix
• How we consolidate any combination of ERPs — group reporting
• Do you need a new ERP, or just the data already inside it? — the S3-to-S5 question, asked properly
• Discuss your Money estate — free assessment