Sell and buy

This is the half of Odoo you will meet in nearly every project, whatever the industry. Learn it properly and you can be useful on almost any implementation.

The buy side

The three-way match — order, receipt, bill — is the control your finance client cares about most, and it is standard. Odoo can be set to bill on ordered quantities or on received quantities, and that single setting decides whether a short delivery is caught automatically or paid in full.

Learn where that setting lives, and always ask which behaviour the client wants. Most say “received” once the difference is explained, and many have never been asked.

Before — on paper 8 steps

1. Purchasing telephones the supplier and agrees a price verbally.
2. A purchase order is typed in Word, emailed, and filed in a folder.
3. The goods arrive. The storekeeper signs the supplier's own delivery note.
4. The signed note goes into a tray on a desk.
5. The bill arrives by email three weeks later.
6. Accounts look for the note in the tray and the order in the folder.
7. Nobody compares the three. The shortfall of forty units is not noticed.
8. The bill is paid in full.

You pay for forty units you never received, and find out at the annual stock count, if ever.

After — in Odoo 4 steps

1. The purchase order is confirmed, and the expected receipt is created with it.
2. The storekeeper receives sixty units and records exactly that.
3. The vendor bill opens already filled with what was received, not what was ordered.
4. The difference is on the screen before anyone approves payment.

The three-way match happens by itself, on every bill, without anyone remembering to do it.

The sell side

The chain you followed in the last stage, now in detail: opportunity, quotation, sales order, delivery, invoice, payment.

The settings that matter most:

Invoicing policy — invoice on ordered quantities or on delivered quantities. Set on the product, and it decides whether a partial delivery can be fully invoiced. It is behind a large share of “the invoice is wrong” complaints.

Delivery policy — ship everything at once, or ship what is available as it becomes available.

Price lists — how customer-specific pricing, currencies, quantity breaks and discounts are handled. Learn them before you agree to build anything custom for pricing, because clients describe unusual pricing that price lists cover perfectly.

Quotation templates — pre-built quotation contents. Cheap to set up and highly visible to your client, which makes them a good early demonstration.

Units of measure — buying in cartons and selling in pieces. Powerful, and a common source of confusion when set up carelessly.

CRM, briefly

CRM is the easiest app to demonstrate and the hardest to make stick. The software works; the discipline is the problem.

Two rules worth carrying into every project:

• Keep the pipeline short. Clients ask for ten or twelve stages. Sales teams then stop updating them and the pipeline becomes fiction. Five or six that mean something is better.
• Insist on lost reasons. Without them a CRM produces no useful analysis, only a list.

Where beginners go wrong

• Building custom pricing before understanding price lists.
• Ignoring the invoicing policy, then debugging invoice amounts for a week.
• Letting the client design the pipeline without asking who will maintain it.
• Forgetting units of measure when purchase and sales units differ.
• Treating CRM as the priority because it demonstrates well, when the money is usually in the order and stock flow.

Practise this

On your own database, without following a tutorial:

1. Set up a supplier, buy 100 units, receive only 60, and bill correctly for what arrived.
2. Change the bill control setting and repeat, so you see both behaviours.
3. Build a price list giving one customer 10% off one category, and another a fixed price per unit.
4. Sell in pieces something bought in boxes of twelve, and check the stock figures.
5. Set one product to invoice on ordered and another on delivered. Deliver half of each and invoice both.
6. Confirm a sale, deliver partially, invoice, and then find every record created — including the accounting entries.

Exercise 6 is the one to repeat until it is automatic. Being able to trace a document chain backwards is the core diagnostic skill of this job.