SM Space · The platform
Meet SM Space: What’s Inside the Platform
Every ERP system can record the transaction. The question worth asking a supplier is how much work it takes one of your people to get there — and whether the shortcuts that save them the work also skip the controls you put in for a reason.
This is the whole platform at one paragraph each: what SM Space is, what is in it, what it deliberately does not do, and how the parts hand work to one another.
Published: · Last updated: · 12 minute read
Finance
Buying
Selling
Stock and assets
People
Shared by all of it
One database. Yours, not a column in everybody’s.
Finance, buying, selling, stock, equipment and people — in one system.
What is SM Space?
SM Space is a web-based ERP system that connects finance, buying, selling, stock, equipment, people and approvals in one place, with each customer’s data held in its own database. It runs in a browser. There is nothing to install, and no desktop client.
It is built for growing and mid-sized businesses — broadly fifty to a thousand people — that run several departments on one system and need real approval and audit controls rather than an honour system.
Four things are true of every part of it:
- One database per customer. Your business data is not in a shared table with a company column beside every row.
- Permissions down to the field. Default-deny, and a field you may not see is absent rather than blanked out.
- Approvals on any document. One engine, switched on per document type as a setting.
- A full history of what happened. Who changed what, when, and on whose authority.
Why we built it differently
The idea behind SM Space is that you name the outcome and the system tells you what stands in the way — and that no shortcut it offers you skips a control.
Most of the work in an ERP system is not the typing. It is the distance between knowing what you want to do and the system letting you do it: finding the screen, then discovering halfway down the form that something upstream is not approved. So you type what you want, and it asks only for what it cannot work out, tells you before the form opens what will stop you, and offers the screen that fixes it.
The second half matters as much as the first. Every shortcut runs the same approval, numbering and quantity rules as the long route, and what it creates is a draft — posting stays a separate decision, made by a person. Convenience and control are not two ends of one dial here.
What’s inside: the modules
Grouped by the job rather than listed alphabetically, because that is the honest picture: these are not separate products sold together. Where a module has a page of its own, its name is the link.
Finance
The ledger everything else posts into.
General Ledger
The centre of the system and the largest module in it: legal entities, books, a fiscal calendar, a chart of accounts you segment yourself, journals, trial balance, budgets, fixed assets and depreciation, period and year-end close, consolidation, multi-currency and bank reconciliation. Nothing is typed twice — a document raised anywhere else becomes a balanced journal on its own.
Tax
Indirect tax that is not tied to one country — VAT, GST, HST or sales tax. Tax authorities, codes, rates, and categories that say how a thing is treated: taxable, exempt, zero-rated or out of scope. Buying and selling both read the same list, so one change to a rate reaches every document that uses it.
Buying
From asking for something to paying for it.
Procurement
Buying end to end: purchase requests, enquiries to several suppliers, comparing and choosing a quotation, contracts and blanket orders, purchase orders, goods and service receipts, quality inspection, landed cost, and supplier invoices matched two, three or four ways before anybody pays. Returns and credit notes branch off. Five of those documents post to the ledger.
Selling
From the first enquiry to the money in.
Sales
Inquiry, quotation with revisions, sales order with a credit check and a stock check, reservation and backorder, pick, pack, deliver, invoice and collect. Returns go through inspection to a credit note. Drop shipments and recurring contracts are handled here too, rather than being worked around somewhere else.
Stock and assets
Things you count, and things with their own name plate.
Inventory
Stock is tracked as a ledger of movements rather than a number you can overwrite, so a balance can always be rebuilt from what actually happened. Lots, serials, bins, transfers, adjustments and physical counts are all supported, with several valuation methods.
Equipment
Individual machines rather than a quantity on a shelf. Each asset has its own record, its own barcode, QR or RFID identifiers, and fields driven by its category. Registration, inspections, compliance, utilisation, rental and finance, plus maintenance plans that generate their own work and take a machine out of service while it is being worked on.
People
The employment record, and the pay that comes out of it.
HR
Five of eleven planned phases are live, and they are the record of employment: people, the organisation structure, employment records, documents and policies with signatures, and leave — policies, enrolment, requests and approval. Recruitment, performance reviews and training records are not built.
Payroll (Canada)
Payroll in Canada, and only in Canada. Federal and provincial tax, CPP and EI worked out each pay period from the CRA’s own T4127 formulas, with employees, components, assignments, balances, pay runs and tax slips. A posted run becomes one balanced journal in the general ledger.
Shared across everything
Written once, used by every module above.
Business Partners
One record per company, whether you buy from them, sell to them, or both. Addresses, contacts, bank accounts, payment terms, settlement currency and status, held once and read by Sales and Procurement alike rather than copied into two lists that drift apart.
Workflow and approvals
One approval engine, not one per module. Routes are versioned, published and then frozen; steps run in a line, side by side, or as any two of three; approvals can be handed to a colleague; and a step is skipped when the approver is the person who raised the document. No route configured means nothing routes.
Reporting
A report designer over datasets read from the live schema. Pick fields, add filters with lookup pickers, validate, run, save, and export to Excel, PDF or CSV. Printed reports carry your own logo and signatures, and a screen’s Print button runs a report filtered by whatever that screen is showing.
Dashboards
Build a widget, see it drawn before you save it, put it on your own dashboard and share it with named people or whole roles. Ownership can be handed on. Sets of widgets ship per module — eight for business partners, nine for purchasing — so there is something to look at on day one.
Document numbering
A numbering rule per kind of document, and a plain check on the form itself: can a number be issued right now? That question used to surface as an unexplained error, and the people hitting it were exactly the ones without access to the screen that explained it.
Notifications
One outbox for the whole system. Email through your own SMTP server or SendGrid, chat into Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Discord or Telegram, text messages through your own Twilio account, WhatsApp through Meta’s Cloud API, and a bell inside the product. You write the templates; opt-outs are kept per channel.
Change history
What a record looked like on a given date, field by field, and who changed it. This one is a paid add-on. The recording itself runs for everybody from day one, licensed or not, so the day you buy it, it works on your own real history rather than starting from empty.
EDI
Inbound customer orders, today. A customer sends an ANSI X12 purchase order, SM Space works out which trading partner it came from, cross-references their part numbers to yours, and creates a draft sales order with an acknowledgement sent back. Outbound documents are not there yet.
The platform underneath
The parts nobody buys separately and everybody relies on.
Access and security
Permissions down to the individual field, worked out in one place, so a screen, a report, an export and the AI assistant all give the same answer. Two-factor sign-in, sign-in with Microsoft or Google, staff imported from your own directory, and rules saying which permissions may never be held by one person.
AI assistant
Ask a question about your own records, or ask for a report, in plain words. It signs in as you and has no permissions of its own, so two people can ask the same question in the same words and correctly get different answers. An administrator decides what it may reach.
Administration
What you can change without asking us: your own fields added to the screens we ship, labels and tooltips per company and per language, users pulled from Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and an upgrade date you pick rather than one we pick for you.
What is deliberately not on that list. No manufacturing, bill of materials or work orders. No project accounting or job costing — a project is a dimension you report on, not a module that bills. No CRM: selling starts at an enquiry, which is already somebody asking to buy. No field service, no demand forecasting, no warehouse scanning, no banking connection and no mobile app. Payroll is Canada only. If one of those is what you came for, we would rather you knew now.
How the modules connect
The modules are not separate products with an overnight file between them: a document raised in one becomes the next document in another, and the ledger entry at the end is written without anybody re-typing a figure. Four chains, each crossing at least three modules:
Buying something
- Purchase request
- Enquiry to suppliers
- Compare quotations
- Purchase order
- Goods receipt
- Inspection
- Supplier invoice, matched
- Payment
Approval can sit on any six of those documents, if you switch it on, and five of them post to the ledger without anybody re-typing a figure.
Selling something
- Inquiry
- Quotation
- Sales order
- Reserve stock
- Pick
- Pack
- Deliver
- Invoice
- Payment
The credit and stock checks sit on the order, so a customer over their limit is stopped before anything is picked — including when the order arrived by EDI.
Stock moving
- Receipt
- Transfer
- Reservation
- Issue
- Valuation
Each one is an insert into a ledger that is never overwritten. Counts and adjustments correct it by adding a row, and the balance is a cache rebuilt from those rows.
It reaching the accounts
- A document is posted
- It raises an event
- The rule engine writes a journal
- Account balances
- Trial balance
- Drill back to the line
A trial-balance figure drills to the account activity behind it, and then to the journal line that made it — which is the receipt somebody booked in on Tuesday.
Payroll works the same way: set up, assign employees, run the period, calculate against the CRA formulas, review, post — and the result is one balanced journal plus the tax slips.
Working with it day to day
Most days in an ERP system are spent navigating it, so SM Space has a command box you open from anywhere and type what you want to do into. Type create po and it asks for the vendor, the warehouse, the item, the quantity and the date it is needed — and nothing else. Currency, payment terms and the order number come from the supplier’s profile or from the server, because a question whose answer the system overwrites should not have been asked.
It forgives a typo and a nickname, and it is built from what you personally may do, so a clerk and a buyer see two different lists. Alongside it: starred favourites, a recent-records list the platform fills in whenever you open anything, and column layouts you arrange once and share. On a purchase order, one button receives everything still outstanding rather than opening the receipt process separately.
The command box has a post of its own, with a working simulation you can type into.
Create Create Purchase Order
It asks for five things
- For vendor
- ACM Limited typed “ACN” — found anyway
- Deliver to warehouse
- Main Warehouse
- Item
- ITEMA MC
- Quantity
- 10
- Required by
- 30 Sep 2026
And does not ask for seven more
Currency Payment terms Delivery terms Unit of measure Order number Status Exchange rate
Creates PO-10493 as a draft. Approval, numbering and every quantity rule run exactly as they do on the long route.
Controls and governance
Every control in SM Space is enforced underneath the screens rather than on them, so a report, an export, an integration and the AI assistant all give the same answer as the form does.
- Permissions are default-deny and go down to the field. A hidden field masks the data, not just the form — the value does not come back from the list or the record either. A role can also be limited to certain rows, and that filter is re-applied every time a report or a widget runs.
- Approvals are one engine used by every module. Routes are versioned, published and then frozen, so a decision made last March can be explained by the route as it stood in March.
- The audit trail has three layers: who created and changed each record; one merged trail of every change, sign-in, error and approval; and an auditor’s workspace with retention rules, sealed periods and evidence exports.
- Posting is always a separate decision from creating. A period’s status decides what may still be posted, control accounts refuse manual entries, and a posted journal is reversed rather than edited.
- You can write down which permissions may never be held by one person — raising a requisition and approving a purchase order, say — with any exception recorded, justified and dated.
Signed in as a buyer
Signed in as a warehouse clerk
- Supplier
- ACM Limited
- ACM Limited
- Payment terms
- Net 30
- Net 30
- Contact
- accounts@acm.example
- accounts@acm.example
- Bank account
- **** 8841
- not on the record
- Credit limit
- $150,000
- not on the record
The row is not blanked out — it is not there. The same two fields are missing from that clerk’s grid, their export, any report they build, and anything they ask the AI assistant.
Who it’s for
Growing businesses and mid-sized organisations — roughly fifty to a thousand people — running finance, buying, selling, stock and people on one system, where a purchase over a certain value genuinely has to be approved and somebody will eventually ask who approved it.
It does not suit everyone. A manufacturer who needs a bill of materials, an agency that bills by project, or a business whose payroll is outside Canada is not a fit today, and we would rather say so than find out on the third call.
Frequently asked questions
- What is SM Space?
- SM Space is a web-based ERP system that connects finance, buying, selling, stock, equipment, people and approvals in one place, with each customer’s data held in its own database. It runs in a browser with nothing to install, and it is built for businesses that need real approval and audit controls rather than a spreadsheet layer over an accounting package.
- What modules does SM Space include?
- General ledger and tax; procurement; sales; inventory and equipment; HR and Canadian payroll; and, shared across all of them, business partners, approvals, reporting, dashboards, document numbering, notifications, change history and EDI. Underneath sits the platform itself — access control, the AI assistant and administration. Each one is a link in the list above.
- Is SM Space cloud-based?
- Yes. It is a browser-based cloud system, and there is no desktop client to install. Each customer’s business data lives in its own database rather than in shared tables with a company column beside every row, which is a different arrangement from most cloud ERP systems and the reason a customer can be given their own fields and their own upgrade date.
- Does it handle approvals?
- Yes, through one approval engine that every module uses. You draw the route on a screen: steps in a line or side by side, conditions on the amount or the supplier or any other field on the document, approvers named as a person, a role or a group, each with a ceiling on what they can approve. Approval is a setting you switch on per document type, not a release we have to ship.
- Can it work in more than one language?
- The product is built for it end to end — languages and cultures, screen labels and field text per language, translated data, and right-to-left layout for Arabic and Hebrew handled properly rather than bolted on afterwards. Which languages are supplied already translated depends on the deployment, so ask us which ones we can show you today.
- Does it keep an audit trail?
- Yes, in three layers. Every auditable record carries who created and changed it and when. Every change, sign-in, error and approval is merged into one trail you can ask by record, by person or between two dates, and a closed period can be sealed so you can prove later that nothing in it moved. Field-level history — what a record looked like on a given date — is the paid add-on.
- Can it connect to other systems?
- Every screen in the product is a client of the same REST API, so anything else can be too. On top of that: inbound EDI orders over ANSI X12, sign-in and staff import from Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, email through SMTP or SendGrid, chat into Teams, Google Chat, Discord or Telegram, text and WhatsApp through your own accounts, and document storage. There is no banking or payment-gateway connection, and no e-commerce or CRM connector.
See how it works with your business
Every business has different workflows, approvals and reporting requirements. A walkthrough can show how SM Space handles the processes your team actually runs — and you choose which screens it covers.