Odoo Accounting Just Got Better - Roadmap Odoo 17

Benjamin: 0:01

Bring additional things, but each time keeping in mind the usability. There are major changes and we pay a lot of efforts not to break anything. So this is why our developers do test the code all the time, so that there is no regression etcetera. So we bring improvements, but we pay attention not to break anything.

Olivier: 0:22

Hi Odooers, and welcome back for another episode of our Tech and Dev series. Today we take you behind the scenes teasing some of our best upcoming accounting features For Odoo 17. Our revolutionary Accounting module has already shaken up the industry and transformed the way accountants work, earning an international reputation. But hold on tight because it's about to get even better. Joining us today to delve into the roadmap of these apps is Benjamin Stienon, one of our accounting product owners at Odoo. We'll be discussing the enhancements that await us and dive into the thought process behind these choices and gain insight into Odoo visionary plans for the future. Whether you're an accountant, an enthusiastic Odoo user, or a change leader within your company, this episode is for you. Ready? Let's dive in. Hi, Benjamin.

Benjamin: 1:06

Hi, Olivier.

Olivier: 1:07

So today we're going to talk about the future a little bit for accounting. Okay. That's exciting, right?

Benjamin: 1:13

That's exciting. That's kind of exciting.

Olivier: 1:15

So what do you have in store for us today? Because Odoo 16 was introducing a lot of things in accounting. So what can we expect for Odoo 17?

Benjamin: 1:23

Yes, indeed, you are right. Odoo 16 was a version where we changed quite a lot of features. We brought innovations, new things. And I would say that v 17 is a moment where we could fine tune those this version, we could improve it somehow and like bring additional things, but each time keeping in mind the usability. So all the efforts we make are in terms of usability, how can we improve, how can we achieve the the same output with less clicks?

Olivier: 2:04

So long story short, we didn't break anything this year or not as much as last

Benjamin: 2:10

Hopefully we didn't break anything and we still have some time just to make sure

Olivier: 2:15

By the way, for those not knowing it, I'm going to say we a lot because I'm part I'm sorry, I'm going to say we. Yes. And I guess we can be proud of it. Yeah. So let's maybe start with generic accounting. So features that are common for like nearly every country, I would say. What did we change on that side?

Benjamin: 2:35

There is one thing that comes to my mind immediately. It's the management of the deferrals. So before in Odoo we had those deferred expenses and deferred revenues.

Olivier: 2:46

Could you explain a few words what it is?

Benjamin: 2:48

Sure. It's like when you sell something, for example, and you know that it has just the month at which you you you do the sale. And so you want to record like a 15 month number one, then a month, number two for 5 months. And it can be across two different fiscal years. You want to impact each month or each year differently. And what we did is that we materialized, that we had records for that for the deferred management, but basically it's not necessary. And so we like changed the way it work before you had to record those things and now it works out of the box from the invoice. You just say which account from your profit and loss account you want to impact. When does it start? When does it end? And Odoo does the magic.

Olivier: 3:49

Okay. And can you explain maybe a little bit how this magic works?

Benjamin: 3:53

The magic works in two ways. Either you want to have very, very detailed entries to track it and for a very, very easy audit, it works for small databases. Each time you do an invoice, when you post the invoice, it will trigger the entries that are necessary. The second way is for bigger databases because we observe that it consumes a lot of entries.

Olivier: 4:21

Okay. So in other words, it creates a lot of journal items, plenty of entries.

Benjamin: 4:25

When you have like ten sales, you want to spread them towards 12 periods, ten So it's a talkative. On big data. Now, suppose that you sell 10,000 invoices and probably for Odoo it's likely. And all those sales are for one year. You come to 120,000 entries, which is a nightmare. And what we decided to do is to allow from a dedicated report to press a button. You click the button. It will trigger globalized entries that have the same output. But rather than having hundreds of them and to multiply, you just add.

Olivier: 5:13

You do it in one go for multiple invoices.

Benjamin: 5:15

In one go, and you will have like for the 12 months I was talking about, you 10,012 way less. But same output.

Olivier: 5:30

Okay, cool. I think that's a good thing because indeed, when your database accounting if you have too many entries like that.

Benjamin: 5:41

Yes. Because in the daily management you will observe those entries each time And certainly it will impact the performances of your database as well.

Olivier: 5:54

Okay. I suggest we move on to our next new feature. I heard about the words audit trail. So what is this mysterious term about?

Benjamin: 6:03

Yes, the audit Trail is a feature that we were talked about and asked for in a legal requirement. So they had to make it themselves to make a proposition because they had to react super fast. And when it came to our attention, we thought that it might be a good option. So in India, each database will have it out of the box because they need it. It's required. But in other countries it's more like the decision of the user. And if he wants it, we decided to, to take this code and to make it an option so that you can go for it and you can benefit from it, but it's not forced.

Olivier: 6:54

Okay. And technically, how does it work?

Benjamin: 6:56

Technically, it will globally allow you to, uh, make sure that you never delete So in Odoo we go for the flexibility, but in the accounting world, it's probably something which is hard for some users to accept. And activating this option guarantees them that they won't be able to delete anything. And when you have multiple users, somehow, even though you trust your colleagues, you want to make sure that the human error will not occur. So in this case, when you activate this option, it's somehow under control. You make sure that any input will never be fully deleted.

Olivier: 7:40

So you keep some kind of of log of the changes that are done as well.

Benjamin: 7:43

That's it. You keep you keep logs and you can track anything that happens and the DB.

Olivier: 7:54

Okay. Next one? hanges in multi company are coming for Odoo 17, right?

Benjamin: 7:58

Yes, indeed. And I would say this time again it comes from India. So they had specific needs. Because it's a key country for us, for Odoo, and in India they have like 36 states, which means that they can have warehouses in those all those states. And each time they have a warehouse, if I remember well, they can have a different tax ID. So it's kind of complex and Odoo 17 will allow the branches management so that you can have a representation of each warehouse, each sub division. It can be a business unit or a branch and you can divide them in Odoo, which is at the moment not exactly feasible in the versions that we all know. But in Odoo 17, we plan to make it happen.

Olivier: 8:55

And how will it work then? Some kind of hierarchy between companies. It's some kind of hierarchy between the companies?

Benjamin: 9:02

So a branch will be materialized as a child company of the company that you are

Olivier: 9:09

And in accounting specifically, how is it going to work? So will it be like in older versions of Odoo where you have, well, different companies? And so each of them will have its own chart of accounts, its own accounting or?

Benjamin: 9:22

No, in this context here you will have a mother company, which is probably the but it's not really a legal entity, but it's a business unit and it shares the chart of accounts of the mother company. So you have three branches,let's call them A, B and C, they will have a common chart of account, common set of taxes, etcetera. And if they have specific needs, like, for example, you would have a bank account in branch A that only branch A should be able to see and branch B should not be able to see. And then you will define this journal and this bank account in branch a more specific on top of the chart of account, the shared chart of account on the mother company.

Olivier: 10:08

So everything is shared unless you define it as being something just for one

Benjamin: 10:12

That's it.

Olivier: 10:12

Okay. Okay.

Benjamin: 10:13

And the mother can see everything because the mother is the legal entity and it But the sisters A and B between them, they can define a way of working that excludes the visibility so that the managers of B won't see what happens in A because it's the choice of the user.

Olivier: 10:37

Yeah, it's different branches. Okay. And is this structure recursive? So I mean, can a child of some some company have children of its own and have like sub branches of sub branches of sub branches?

Benjamin: 10:48

As far as I can tell, yes.

Olivier: 10:50

Okay. Cool, cool. So we didn't break anything, but this is a big change.

Benjamin: 10:55

There are major changes and we pay a lot of efforts not to break anything. So this is why our developers and you know it better than I do, do test the code all the time so that there is no regression, etcetera. So we bring improvements, but we pay attention not to break anything.

Olivier: 11:13

Okay. And indeed, from a developer point of view, this branch thing is a bit And then when you when you see how it's supposed to work, I think it's perfectly fine. The only thing is that it changes the way you have to see in your mind the company ID field on the records. So I won't give any more technical details. But that's how I was convinced by it. Okay. So another feature for which we change a lot of things that is dear to my heart is the report. So what do we do for the reports?

Benjamin: 11:45

I guess by humility I should give you the floor when it comes to reports because We improve them quite a lot. What I can tell from the functional point of view and then you will develop maybe more the technical one, but from the functional point of view, one of the things that clearly comes to my mind is that now we can have sections, reports with sections. What does it mean? It means you can have both a balance sheet and a profit and loss grouped together in a group report, or we call it a composite report for the moment. It means that, for example, for the user, he can in one click obtain the pdf, the grouped PDF of both his balance sheet and his PNL. This is clearly a feedback received from accounting firms. They want to do it. They have to do it all the time.

Olivier: 12:38

It's a legal requirement in France, right? The PNL and balance sheet together.

Benjamin: 12:42

I'm not too sure that it's a legal requirement because we could do it before, balance sheet, obtain the PNL, then potentially group them in one.

Olivier: 12:56

Yeah, I mean, you have to submit them together and it's going to be easier now.

Benjamin: 13:00

Yes, it's going to be easier. And certainly in the daily management between an accounting firm and its clients, they can in one click, send all a group of reports that the client asks for.

Olivier: 13:12

And just to be clear, for people maybe getting worried about what you just said, report, you load both of them at the same time. So we did something clever with that. And basically those reports will be displayed as different pages. And when you switch page, they will be loaded roughly. That's how it works.

Benjamin: 13:32

It's super flexible. If you want not to use it, you can if you want to use it, to use your balance sheet standalone on one hand and grouped with the PNL on the other hand. You can do it. It's super flexible.

Olivier: 13:45

Also, this will allow defining more complete tax reports because you know, with submit with them depending on various conditions and that most people don't don't need. And so, so far, we did not really support them for nearly every country. I think Luxembourg is the only one for which we still support everything in Odoo 16, and we made that choice. And with the sections, we will be able to add those appendices over the years everywhere without I mean putting it in front of everyone all the time and just making the user interface crowded with tons of options everywhere. And there will just be inactive sections that people can activate if they want them. So I think that's also a very nice use of the very same feature. So that's interesting because it's doing two things at the same time.

Benjamin: 14:34

And I think it will also allow users to understand better that some reports I have the example of the tax report in Europe and the its annex, which is the EC sales list. I'm not sure that for the average user, the newbie entering Odoo discovering, creating this company, that he is aware that when the tax report impacts some tax grids, then an annex is necessary. And thanks to this feature, it can it can become very clear indeed.

Olivier: 15:07

Indeed. So on the report for the technical changes, I mean, okay, this one is We didn't say it, but the the styling of the report is totally different. It's way more modern today. It has been a long time since we last really changed it entirely. And so it was about time, I think, to just modernize everything for the technical argument behind it. Also, the all the styling has been rewritten, so it's way cleaner now I can say it also all the reports are now using the JavaScript side is using Owl. So that is a nice improvement and it's a allowed, I mean introducing the sections and so on. And also it's entirely customizable now, which was not the case before. I mean if you wanted to customize something on the JavaScript side of the repository for small changes in the way the UI elements interact with each other, it was just not possible. It was not made for that. Now it's made for that, just like the Python part is. And so I think it's a really nice improvement as well. I mean, developers will like it. I'm pretty sure about it. So kudos to Ruben too, for the work he did on that. If you listen to us. Hi. Okay. So I think we can move on to the 2 to 1 next point. Do you have anything more to say about what we changed for 17?

Benjamin: 16:24

Yes, I think we could focus on the usability improvements, small details that We changed the way we allow sending and printing invoices. There was a wizard, and when you pressed on the wizard, you had already the attachments, etcetera, that you plan to send to the user. We changed the way it worked to be more intuitive. Like, for example, the attachments are not there anymore. You have just a placeholder mentioning that the attachment will be done, but it's not generated. So upon pressing the button.

Olivier: 17:01

And you gain time with that

Benjamin: 17:03

You gain time, it goes faster, you don't store anything that. Did I send it? Did I go until the end of the process or did I discard the action? Which means that finally I pressed the send and print button, but I didn't send it at the end of the day. This is to me, without entering in the details, a major improvement in Odoo 17.

Olivier: 17:23

Yeah, I agree because I mean it's it's probably not the killer feature that we The first thing that we're going to talk about every time but still this kind of improvement is maybe more important actually, because it's impacting every flow of everyone every day, which is not the case for even things like the reports or stuff like that.

Benjamin: 17:43

And I think I can also tell that it simplifies the code. It has been done in a way which makes it functionally more intuitive, but also technically more readable.

Olivier: 17:55

So everyone wins. Absolutely. Other small improvements like that. So we did a lot of them, but if you can just name a few of them.

Benjamin: 18:02

Yes, certainly we have a theft reports. It's like reports for audit. You have to to like send all your accounting in a structured way and before when you had to do that but your your records were not perfectly correct, like, for example, a zip code was missing for a customer and it was required or the country was missing, even though we allow it in Odoo at the moment, you wanted to obtain your report. You had like errors raised all the time until all those corrections were made.

Olivier: 18:40

So you had to retry every time you checked. You fixed something to see if there was another one missing.

Benjamin: 18:46

So you correct all the zip codes and then it comes to the countries and then it And here we changed the way it work to avoid the user having to spam the button all the time. And now.

Olivier: 19:02

All the user hearing users hearing that being like, Oh yeah.

Benjamin: 19:06

Definitely. And it's it's something we could foresee. And so now from the report you will have banners on the report telling you that, okay, if you try to export it, you will face those issues. So press on the on the banner before correct the mistakes, the missing records that prevent you to have a proper report, then retry.

Olivier: 19:28

And it should work.

Benjamin: 19:29

And then do it in one click.

Olivier: 19:31

Yeah. And it's true that we did this kind of improvements in various places and generating the follow up for everyone and one of them was missing an email, if your follow up level requires an email or the phone number, if you send an SMS, it was not working. It was blocking and telling you, Oh, you need to fix some customers first and it didn't tell you which ones. So it was not very easy to use. And so we improved that so that you have just one error saying, Oh, some customers are missing information. All the other ones we generate the follow up for them and for them you have a button to see them and fix them and then you can retry sending the follow up. I think it's way better like that.

Benjamin: 20:11

Yes. I have other examples as well. With the Swiss invoices, for example, they have this Swiss bill very specific to the Swiss market. So it's a QR code.

Olivier: 20:21

And the invoices you make for the customers pretty much like what is done for dedicated page.

Benjamin: 20:31

And here again, if you had like one information missing, it could prevent you Now it's way more responding. If you press the button, you want all those PDFs, you will obtain the QR code for each invoice that allows it and for the other ones, even though you expect it a QR code but record well information are missing. At least you obtain a pdf, you don't get an error.

Olivier: 20:57

For all these small improvements like that where they all made for Odoo 17 or

Benjamin: 21:05

No. Each time we challenge the features, the improvements, each time we wonder requirement? Then we will go for the older possible version and each time it doesn't break anything and we can have the users benefiting from it immediately. We do it in stable versions.

Olivier: 21:27

Of course, without ruining the stable policy for the developers among you. Absolutely. But indeed, we try to stay flexible and have something that meets the need because it's not just a technical problem to solve.

Benjamin: 21:37

Each time we challenge that because we know that for the users to have it as

Olivier: 21:47

Okay. So another big subject. I mean, the other big subject when it comes to accounting is localization.

Benjamin: 21:55

Yes, indeed.

Olivier: 21:56

What did we do? Did we do something on localization?

Benjamin: 21:59

It's the same team that does the localizations in accounting, the generic I could tell you that we brought new COAs, new reports, new exports, new EDIs. I could mention plenty of countries that we focus on like France, Italy, Norway, Netherlands, Poland. But probably if I go too much in the Italian details, the Dutch users won't care and the other way around. So what I could tell you is that each time it goes about the localizations, we have to adapt our glasses and to remember that the specificities of a market are not always like what we know in Belgium, because the R&D is mainly in Belgium. We have to adapt. We have to listen carefully. This being said, there are things that we do for everyone that we didn't mention yet. It's that Odoo became an access point on the Peppol network. It has been demanded plenty of times and now it becomes a reality.

Olivier: 23:12

So, could you explain more, practically speaking what it means?

Benjamin: 23:14

Peppol is a network, a closed network where all the people who interact in it identified behind access points. And we as an access point, we operate like, like a post office, we receive or we send invoices, envelopes. And we must make sure as an access point that each time we receive something, we deliver it to the proper recipient. And each time someone sends an invoice on the network to someone, we must be in a position where we can identify which access point hides or represents this and this recipient, and we must guarantee that we can play the role and the rules of this network.

Olivier: 24:03

And transmit the information

Benjamin: 24:04

Transmit the information, receiving or sending, which we do. Now, I could go more in the details, but the nice thing here is that it impacts more than one country. It impacts plenty of countries.

Olivier: 24:18

Yeah, I guess something like that. It must be like worldwide?

Benjamin: 24:21

Yes, it's worldwide. It was a European initiative, but it's also present now in Singapore, in Japan and in New Zealand, Australia. So it's much wider.

Olivier: 24:32

So yeah, an interesting feature indeed. Uh, all right. Anything else regarding localization or country specific features like that?

Benjamin: 24:39

Maybe one, because it's a key one for the Swiss market because they are not part They don't follow the regulation. So for the bank synchronization, we had no proper solution. And we implement the Swiss standards with billing for the Swiss users so that it's also feasible for them to synchronize their bank transactions easily even though they are not part of the EU.

Olivier: 25:11

Yeah, that's good news for them as well.

Benjamin: 25:11

That's good news for them.

Olivier: 25:14

All right. I think we're reaching the end of the episode already. How was it?

Benjamin: 25:20

Oh, it was. It was a pleasure.

Olivier: 25:22

It was? Yeah. Same for me. You know, always. Every day, maybe. Would you have a final word for people listening to us?

Benjamin: 25:30

Yes. Probably because of the growth of Odoo, our team in R&D accounting, it also When I started three years ago, uh, we were one and a half or two product owners. Now we are four, four and a half. And in terms of developers as well, it was multiplied by three, like 12 developers became 35 or something like that. We are now in a position where we can answer to the feedbacks in a way that people and users can feel our efforts. The time between the feedback and the answer is shortened a lot.

Olivier: 26:21

And I think with the number of different countries variants, the different And I would say this this is going to improve again in the future because we're just like hired eight people, is that it? Yes, I guess. So it's going to be even better in the future.

Benjamin: 26:39

Yes. And we can see that the developers quite quickly are able to bring the

Olivier: 26:47

So that will be the final word for today. The bright future is ahead of us. Absolutely. Thank you for your answers.

Benjamin: 26:54

Thank you.

Olivier: 26:55

And that brings us to the end of another episode. I hope you enjoyed the sneak peek of Odoo 17 and it left you craving for more. If you're eager to explore further the exciting offerings of Odoo 17. Mark your calendars for our grand in-house event Odoo experience taking place next November and if you're in the mood for more captivating content, I highly recommend checking out our episode featuring KPMG. In that episode, we delve deep into the way the role of accountants is evolving and how technology is propelling it into a new era. It's an enlightening discussion. You don't want to pass it. Until next time, Cheers.