About

P21 practitioners who build software.

Not web developers who learned Prophet 21. Not a startup guessing at distribution problems. We’ve been inside P21 for over two decades — and Augur is built on everything we’ve learned.

P21 first, always

“Prophet 21 is the worst ERP out there — except for all the others.”— Stuart Jackson, founder

We say this because we’ve been in the trenches with P21 for over two decades. We know where it frustrates you. We also know it’s the best distribution ERP on the market. Augur is built to make the most of both realities — pricing libraries, customer-specific catalogs, order workflows, not surface-level data connections.

The company

SimpleApps was founded by Stuart Jackson, who started as a Prophet 21 system administrator before building the tools that became Augur. We’re not vendors who learned P21 from the outside — we’re practitioners who built solutions to solve our own problems, then productized them for other distributors.

We started with SimpleWeb — a hosting and e-commerce platform that served dozens of P21 distributors. It proved the model: connect P21 data to modern web experiences and let distributors compete online. Augur is the next generation — rebuilt with modern architecture, a team of 8 developers, and AI at its core. We’ve been at P21WWUG every year since 2009 — if you’ve been in the P21 world, chances are we know some of the same people.

Our history

2000
Stuart Jackson begins working with Prophet 21 ERP
2003
Second P21 implementation — solo data conversion completed in 30 days
2008
Starts developing P21 e-commerce integrations
2009
First P21WWUG conference — has attended every year since (missed only one)
2011
First P21 e-commerce site goes live
2013
Creates first third-party API for Prophet 21 — before Epicor had one
2021
Microservices begin replacing legacy API — rebuilding the backend from the ground up
2023
First client sites launch on Augur hosting platform
2025
Team adopts AI-native development with Claude Code and Cursor