Industries
Where we've done this before.
Every business says its process is unusual, and in the details it usually is. What repeats is the shape of the problem - the handoff where information stops moving. Here is what that looks like, industry by industry.
From tender estimate to final payment certificate
A construction business runs on two numbers that must never drift apart: what a job was priced at, and what it is actually costing today. When estimating lives in a spreadsheet, site data in a notebook, and subcontractor claims in an inbox, nobody can answer that until the job is finished - far too late to act on it. This is the full chain, built in Odoo.
The process we cover
Resources & activity data
The cost backbone: labour grades, plant and equipment, and materials, each with a rate, mapped to the activities that consume them. Site time is booked against the activity it belongs to, so cost accrues where the work happened rather than in one lump.
Tender estimation
The estimate is built from those same rates, item by item, with overhead and margin applied where you decide rather than buried in a formula. The accepted tender becomes the project's budget, so every later comparison is against the number you actually bid.
Subcontracting
Scope packaged out to subcontractors, each with its own order, agreed rates and retention terms. Claims are checked against work certified on site before a bill is approved, so nobody is paid ahead of what they have delivered.
Progress billing
Client invoicing driven by certified progress rather than the calendar. Each valuation carries what was completed this period, what was billed before, and what remains - so a certificate can be defended line by line when it is queried.
Payment schedules
Staged terms, retention held and released on its own dates, and a forward view of what is due in and out. Retention is the money most often forgotten; here it carries a date from the day it is held.
Cost vs budget, live
The point of the previous five: committed cost, actual cost and the tender budget in one view, per activity. Overruns surface while the job is still running and something can still be done about them.
How we make it happen
We start from your estimate, not from Odoo
The first session is spent on how you price work today - the rate build-up, the activity breakdown, the allowances. That structure becomes the analytic backbone in Odoo. Getting this wrong is the single most expensive mistake in a construction rollout, because every cost report afterwards inherits it.
We agree who owns each number
Site records progress and consumption. Procurement owns commitments. Finance owns certification and release. Named owners and required fields are settled before anything is configured, because a process nobody owns fails no matter how well the software is set up.
We rehearse on one real job
A single live project is run end to end - estimate, subcontract order, a partial certification, a retention hold, an invoice - before anyone else is trained. Every awkward case a construction business actually hits gets found here rather than in week one.
We train by role, on your own data
Site staff learn the two screens they need, not the whole system. Finance learn certification and retention. Sessions use your jobs and your subcontractors, because generic demo data teaches people nothing about their own work.
We stay through the first billing cycle
Go-live is not the finish line - the first full valuation and payment run is. We are there for it, and we fix what the real cycle exposes rather than handing over a system and a manual.
Knowing what a container actually cost you
An importer's margin is decided long before the sale. Freight, duty, insurance and clearing charges all land after the purchase order, often on separate invoices weeks apart - and if they never reach the product's cost, every margin report afterwards is optimistic fiction. This is the full path from purchase order to customer invoice.
The process we cover
Buying
Supplier orders with agreed incoterms, currencies and lead times, and the import paperwork kept against the order rather than in someone's email. Expected arrival dates feed straight into what sales are allowed to promise.
Landed cost
Freight, duty, insurance and clearing apportioned onto the goods they belong to - equally, or by quantity, weight or volume - so stock is valued at what it truly cost to land. This is the step spreadsheets skip, and the reason reported margin and real margin disagree.
Storing
Receiving against the order, multi-location warehousing, and lot or serial tracking where the goods require it. Stock on hand, stock committed and stock still on the water are three different numbers, and the business needs all three.
Selling
Price lists per customer or channel, with margin shown against true landed cost at the moment of quoting - so a discount is a decision somebody made knowingly rather than one discovered at month end.
Billing
Vendor bills matched against what was ordered and what was received, so an overcharge is caught before it is paid. Customer invoicing follows the delivery policy you chose, and partial shipments are tested before go live rather than discovered in week one.
Real margin reporting
Margin by product, customer and shipment, calculated on landed cost. It usually reorders which lines people thought were profitable, which is the whole point of doing the work.
How we make it happen
We settle the costing method first
Landed costs in Odoo only apply to products valued at FIFO or Average - the system refuses them on Standard costing. So the valuation method, and whether it is automated or manual, is decided and agreed with your accountant before anything else is built. Discovering this after data migration means redoing the migration.
We map your real charge types
Every charge that hits a shipment - ocean freight, inland haulage, duty, insurance, demurrage, clearing agent fees - is listed and given a split basis. Duty usually follows value, haulage follows weight or volume. Getting the basis right per charge is what makes the resulting cost defensible.
We re-run a shipment you already closed
Before go-live we take a past consignment with known final numbers and put it through the configured system. If Odoo's landed cost does not reconcile to the spreadsheet your team already trusts, the configuration is wrong - and we find that on historical data instead of on live stock.
We connect it to what sales can see
The costing only pays off if the person quoting sees the real margin. Price lists, margin visibility and approval rules for discounting are configured as part of the same piece of work, not as a later phase that never happens.
We hand over the month-end
Stock valuation, vendor bill matching and margin reporting are walked through with finance on a real close, so the numbers are understood and trusted rather than accepted because the system produced them.
Other sectors we work in
Written up more briefly for now. The approach is the same: follow one order end to end, find the handoff that breaks, and build outwards from there.
Manufacturing
Bills of materials and routings that match how the shop floor actually builds, work orders that reflect real capacity, and component consumption that keeps stock honest. Where production is partly outsourced, the subcontracted steps are modelled rather than handled off-system.
Retail & POS
Point of sale that keeps working when the connection does not, with stock and pricing shared across every till and the back office. Multi-store setups get one product catalogue and one stock picture instead of a reconciliation exercise every evening.
Services & HR
Time captured against the job it belongs to, so project profitability is a fact rather than an estimate, and billable work does not quietly go unbilled. On the people side: the employee record, leave, and the approvals that sit around them.
eCommerce
An online catalogue backed by the same stock and pricing the rest of the business runs on, so the site cannot sell what the warehouse does not have. Payment and delivery providers configured and tested properly, because checkout is the one flow that has to work first time.
Logistics
Multi-warehouse and multi-step flows - receive, store, pick, pack, ship - configured to match how goods physically move rather than forcing the warehouse to match the software. Batch and wave picking where the volume justifies it.
Energy & Supply
Recurring supply against contracts, scheduled deliveries, and billing that follows what was actually supplied in the period. The reporting question here is nearly always the same: which contracts are genuinely profitable once servicing them is counted.
These pages describe scope of work and how we run an implementation. They are not client case studies, and no performance figures are claimed - ask us for references and we will introduce you directly.
Recognise your own process here?
Tell us where the handoffs break in your business. If Odoo is not the right answer, we will say so.
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