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Epicor announced on 6 January 2026 that Prophet 21 version 2028.1, tentatively scheduled for May 2028, will be the final on premises feature release. On premises customers receive active support through 30 June 2029 and sustaining support, covering security and operational continuity only, from 1 July 2029, while new features continue in Epicor Cloud. Distributors on P21 therefore face a cloud move within a few years, and integrations should work with both deployments.
Prophet 21 is Epicor's ERP for wholesale distributors (industrial and MRO, electrical, HVAC and plumbing, fasteners, medical supplies and similar verticals) with inventory management, order management and pricing, purchasing, warehouse management and financials, while Epicor Kinetic is built for discrete manufacturers. The two have separate codebases and roadmaps. Prophet 21 came to Epicor in 2011 through the merger with Activant Solutions and is widely known simply as P21.
Yes, Epicor provides the Prophet 21 API, often called P21 Middleware, with a token endpoint (/api/security/token), an OData service for reading tables such as oe_hdr, inv_mast, inv_loc, invoice_hdr and customer, and a transaction API (/uiserver0/api/v2/transaction) for posting documents. Access and documentation are arranged through Epicor for licensed customers, which is why many vendors prefer a managed connector such as Makini's to coding against it directly.
Makini lists Prophet 21 resources for purchase requisitions, requests for quotation, purchase orders, receipts, sales orders, invoices, production orders, bills of materials, stock, customers, vendors, currencies, taxes, accounts, locations, sites and organizations, where the connection exposes them. For an inventory optimization vendor that covers item balances by location, open purchase and sales orders and supplier records in one schema, synced on an interval set by the Makini plan rather than in real time.
Only on the network side: in both cases the distributor's administrator connects Prophet 21 through Makini Link with the P21 API credentials, and the vendor's product never sees them. If an on premises P21 Middleware server sits behind the company firewall, IT allows Makini's five published fixed IP addresses or sets up a VPN, while Epicor Cloud tenants need no network change. Prophet 21 is a Tier III platform in Makini's credit model either way.
Read first: pull Prophet 21 stock by location, open purchase orders and recent sales orders through Makini to compute reorder points per branch. When action is needed, create a purchase requisition rather than a purchase order where the connection and the P21 user's permissions allow, because a requisition is a request the distributor's buyer reviews in Prophet 21 before it becomes a PO. Nothing is approved or sent to a supplier by the product itself.
