Odoo as a user

Beginners usually start by learning apps one at a time, and find each one slow. The reason is that they are re-learning the same shared behaviour every time.

Odoo has a small set of ideas that appear everywhere. Learn those first and each new app becomes a couple of hours of work rather than a couple of weeks.

Set yourself up properly

Open a free trial, or install Odoo locally if you can. Then turn off demo data if you have a choice, and enter your own small business instead — twenty products, ten customers, a few suppliers.

Invented data teaches you very little. Data you entered yourself, and understand, lets you tell whether what you are seeing is right.

The ideas that repeat

Records and models. Everything is a record of some type: a contact, a product, a sales order, an invoice. Every type behaves consistently, which is why the system feels the same everywhere.

Contacts. One address book for everyone. The same company can be a customer, a supplier and a delivery address. Individuals can be linked to companies. Almost every document points at a contact.

Products. Sold, purchased, stocked, manufactured and invoiced from one record. The product type decides whether stock is tracked, and the product category often decides accounting and valuation behaviour. Get these two ideas straight early — a surprising number of consulting problems are really product configuration problems.

Companies and users. One database can hold several legal entities. Users get access through groups. This becomes central at stage 08.

Views. The same records shown different ways: list, form, kanban, calendar, pivot, graph. Learn to switch views rather than assuming what you were shown first is all there is.

Search, filter, group by. A list view plus grouping answers most questions people ask for reports. This is the highest-value hour you can spend in Odoo.

Chatter. The message and history panel on most records — messages, logged notes, tracked field changes, scheduled activities, attachments. It is where “who changed this and when” is answered.

Activities. Scheduled next actions on a record. How Odoo handles follow-up.

Follow one flow end to end

Do this before learning any app in depth. It takes an afternoon and it teaches more than a week of videos.

1. Create a product and a customer.
2. Make a quotation, confirm it as a sales order.
3. Deliver the goods, and watch the stock move.
4. Create the invoice from the order, and post it.
5. Register the payment.
6. Open the accounting entries and find the postings your actions created.
7. Open a pivot report and find that sale in it.

Then do the same in reverse: a purchase order, a receipt, a vendor bill, a payment.

You now have the outline of most implementations. Everything after this is depth.

Practise searching

Give yourself questions and answer them using only filters, grouping and the pivot view:

• Which customers bought nothing in the last three months?
• What was sold per product category, by month?
• Which quotations are still open, per salesperson?
• Which vendor bills are unpaid and overdue?
• What is stock on hand per location?

Every one is answerable without any development. Consultants who cannot do this build custom reports the system did not need, and clients pay for it.

Habits worth forming now

• Read what you are told, in the record. Chatter usually answers the question.
• Check the version. Screens move between versions. Always know which one you are in.
• Do not enable developer mode yet. It is stage 10. Getting comfortable with the business behaviour first makes the technical layer far easier to understand later.
• Write down what confused you. Your notes now are training material later, because your clients will be confused by exactly the same things.

When to move on

You are ready for the next stage when you can:

• Take an unfamiliar app and work out what it does without help.
• Answer a business question with filters and a pivot in a couple of minutes.
• Explain to someone else what a product category is for.
• Follow a sale from quotation to payment and find every record it created.