It would be almost impossible for a small group of developers to oversee every aspect of GNU Enterprise. In order to deal with this complexity the project is decomposed into separate projects known as packages each with vertical industry templates. Each package consists of everything needed to provide a single feature set to GNU Enterprise.
Templates are a way to group the packages by industry.
For example, the GNUE Accounting package provides General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Recievable, etc. These guidelines ensure that the package will work on any system that has successfully installed the basic distribution. They also ensure that the package is friendly toward other GNU Enterprise packages. The basic distribution of GNU Enterprise will contain several packages that are determined to be essential to a majority of businesses. Only standard packages will be considered for inclusion in the basic distribution.