People and services

Manufacturing and trading businesses sell things. Service businesses sell hours. The apps in this stage exist to make hours behave like a product — planned, delivered, costed and invoiced.

The service chain

The pattern is worth memorising, because it repeats across every services client:

Sales order → project → tasks → timesheets → invoice.

An hour recorded on a timesheet has two effects. It is a cost, through the employee’s hourly cost, and it can be revenue, if the sales order is set to invoice on delivered time. That is what makes project profitability possible without a spreadsheet.

The settings that decide it all:

• Service invoicing policy — invoice a fixed price, or invoice the hours actually recorded.
• Does the service create a project or a task when the order is confirmed?
• Employee hourly cost, which drives the cost side of profitability.
• Billable versus non-billable time.

Get these four right and profitability reporting works by itself. Get them wrong and the client will ask you to build reports that cannot be built.

Before — on paper 7 steps

1. The engineer writes his hours on Thursday, from memory of the whole week.
2. A supervisor types the sheet into Excel.
3. The project manager decides which hours look billable.
4. An invoice is typed from that judgement.
5. The client disputes two lines and nobody can prove them.
6. The lines are dropped to keep the relationship.
7. Whether the project made money is known only after it has finished.

Revenue lost in somebody's memory, and profit discovered too late to do anything about it.

After — in Odoo 4 steps

1. The engineer records the hour against the task on the day he works it, from his phone.
2. His cost rate is applied automatically, and billable time appears on the sales order.
3. The invoice is produced from the recorded hours, with the detail attached to it.
4. Project profitability is visible while the project is still running and can still be corrected.

Hours become cost and revenue at the moment they are worked, not at the moment they are remembered.

Project and Timesheets

Start small. Project is genuinely simple — tasks moving through stages — and clients get value from it in days.

Watch for:

• Timesheet discipline. The app works; people not filling it in is the risk. Make entry take seconds, or it will not happen.
• Too many stages, exactly as with the CRM pipeline.
• Cost rates being sensitive information. Not everyone should see them.

Helpdesk and Field Service

Helpdesk is ticketing with teams, stages and SLA policies. The interesting configuration is always the SLA: what starts the clock, what stops it, and what happens when it is breached.

Field Service is work that happens at the customer’s site — scheduling, mobile entry of time, materials used, and a signature on completion. For maintenance, installation and inspection companies it is often the whole project.

Both are Enterprise apps. Check the client’s edition before designing around them; proposing Helpdesk to a Community client is an awkward conversation.

HR, and a warning about payroll

Employees is the base record, and the structure — departments, managers, contracts, working schedules — feeds everything else. Recruitment, Time Off and Appraisals are approachable and are frequently a client’s first Odoo project, because they are low-risk and popular with staff.

Payroll is different. Treat it as a specialism.

Payroll is deeply country-specific: tax bands, social insurance, end-of-service, overtime rules, statutory reports and payslip formats. Odoo ships localizations for some countries and not others. Where none exists, payroll is a serious custom build with legal consequences if it is wrong.

Two rules:

1. Check whether a payroll localization exists for the country before saying anything. Not whether accounting is localized — payroll specifically.
2. Never estimate payroll casually. More beginners have been damaged by an optimistic payroll estimate than by any other part of Odoo.

Time Off and Attendances feed payroll through work entries. Understand that chain before promising an automated payroll run.

Expenses

Small, useful, and an easy win. Employees submit expenses, managers approve, finance posts and reimburses. It connects HR to accounting cleanly and is often the app that convinces staff the new system is worth using.

Where beginners go wrong

• Promising payroll without checking the localization.
• Ignoring the invoicing policy on services, so profitability never works.
• Designing timesheets that take too long to fill in.
• Building Helpdesk-style workflows for Community clients who cannot install it.
• Forgetting that cost rates are confidential.
• Treating HR as simple because the screens look simple. The rules behind them are legal, not technical.

Practise this

1. Sell a service invoiced on delivered hours, record timesheets, and invoice from them.
2. Set an employee hourly cost and produce a profitability figure for that project.
3. Configure a Time Off type with an allocation and an approval step, then request and approve leave.
4. Build a Helpdesk team with an SLA, and breach it deliberately to see what happens.
5. Submit and approve an expense, then find the accounting entry it produced.
6. Look up whether Odoo provides a payroll localization for your country, and read what it covers.

Exercise 6 is not busywork. Knowing that answer for your own market is the difference between a confident sales conversation and a dangerous one.