Automate the work your business repeats

Background Tasks Unleashed (BTU) turns routine back-office work into scheduled, observable automation inside Frappe and ERPNext — all configured from the Desk, with no code deploys.

If someone logs in every morning (or every month-end) to run the same report, send the same emails, or push the same documents, that job belongs in BTU.

What teams automate with BTU

•  Automatic invoicing

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  Generate customer invoices on a schedule and email them the moment they're ready.

•  Purchase orders to suppliers

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  Batch and dispatch POs to vendors overnight instead of clicking Send all day.

•  Scheduled reports

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  Build and deliver recurring reports to inboxes — daily, weekly, or month-end.

•  Payment collection

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  Chase overdue invoices with automated reminders and collection runs.

•  Data syncs & integrations

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  Poll APIs, push data to partners, and keep external systems in step on a cron.

•  Any recurring Python job

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  Point BTU at a function, give it a schedule, and get full logs plus email alerts.

See a real task — and its result

Every run records exactly what happened — the output it printed and the value it returned — in a BTU Task Log you can open right from the Desk:

A completed BTU Task Log — Standard Output (what the task printed) and Result Message (what it returned)

Try it in 5 minutes

The fastest way to understand BTU is to run the built-in weather sample end to end:

Your first task Install BTU

How it works

1. Define a BTU Task — a Python function path plus arguments.
2. Give it a BTU Task Schedule — cron timing with a per-schedule time zone.
3. The BTU Scheduler daemon fires the task at the right moment.
4. An RQ worker runs it and writes a BTU Task Log with output, result, and timing.

See the mental model for the full picture.

Quick start

I want to…	Start here
Run my first task	Your first task
Install BTU end-to-end	Installation
Understand the architecture	Mental model
Set up the scheduler daemon	BTU Scheduler
Configure email alerts	Email integration

The two components

BTU ships as two open-source pieces that work together:

1. BTU Frappe app (Datahenge/btu) — the Desk UI: Tasks, Schedules, Logs, Run Later, and Configuration.
2. BTU Scheduler (Datahenge/btu_scheduler_py) — the cron engine that reads schedules and fires tasks at run time.

Both are required for recurring schedules. See the BTU Scheduler section for setup.

Requirements

• Frappe v15+ bench with Redis and RQ workers
• PostgreSQL or MariaDB (the scheduler reads the same site database)
• BTU Scheduler daemon running continuously (btu-py run-daemon)

ERPNext is not required.