Accounting Terminologies

Journal
A journal is like a folder in which you record all transactions of the same
type: all the statements of a bank account, all customer invoices, all
supplier bills. It's used to organize similar transactions together.
Payment Terms
Payment terms describe how and when a customer invoice (or supplier
bill) should be paid over the time. Example: 30% direct payment,
balance due in two months.
Bank Reconciliation
Bank reconciliation is the process of matching transactions from your
bank records with existing journal items or creating new journal items
on the fly. It is a process of verification to ensure that your bank and
your records in Odoo say the same thing.
Reconciliation
Journal items reconciliation is the process of linking several journal
items together like an invoice and a payment. This allows you to mark
invoices as paid. It is also useful when comparing values of 'goods
received not invoiced' and 'goods shipped not billed' accounts.
Deposit Ticket
Deposit tickets group several payment orders (usually checks) that are
deposited together at the bank at the same time. This allows an easy
reconciliation with the bank statement line if the line has one line per
deposit.
Journal Entry
A journal entry is an accounting transaction, usually related to a
financial document: invoice, payment, receipt, etc. A journal entry
always consists of at least two lines, described here as journal items,
which credit or debit specific accounts. The sum of the credits of all
journal items of a journal entry must be equal to the sum of their debits
for the entry to be valid.
Journal Item
A line of a journal entry, with a monetary debit or credit associated with
a specific account.
Analytic Accounts
Sometimes called Cost Accounts, are accounts that are not part of the
chart of accounts and that allow you to track costs and revenues.
Analytic accounts are usually grouped by projects, departments, etc. for
analysis of a company's expenditures. Every journal item is posted in a
regular account in the chart of account and can be posted to an analytic
account for the purpose of reporting or analysis.
Analytic Entries
Costs or revenues posted to analytic accounts, usually related to journal
entries.
Sales Receipt
A receipt or other slip of paper issued by a store or other vendor
describing the details of a purchase (amount, date, department, etc.).
Sales receipt are usually used instead of invoices if the sale is paid in
cash in a store.
Fixed Assets
Property owned by the company, usually with a useful life greater than
one reporting period. Odoo Asset management is used to manage the
depreciation / amortization of the asset over the time. Typical examples
would be capital equipment, vehicles, and real estate.
Deferred Revenues
Are used to recognize revenues for sales of services that are provided
over a long period of time. If you sell a 3 year maintenance contract, you
can use the deferred revenue mechanism to recognize 1/36 of the
revenue every month until the contract expires, rather than taking it all
initially or at the end.
Fiscal Position
Define the taxes that should be applied for a specific customer/vendor or
invoice. Example: If some customers benefit from specific taxes
(government, construction companies, EU companies that are VAT
subjected,…), you can assign a fiscal position to them and the right tax
will be selected according to the products they buy.
Double-entry bookkeeping
Odoo automatically creates all the behind-the-scenes journal entries for
each of your accounting transactions: customer invoices, point of sale
order, expenses, inventory moves, etc.
Odoo uses the rules of double-entry bookkeeping system: all journal
entries are automatically balanced (sum of debits = sum of credits).
The Profit and Loss (P&L) report shows the performance of the
company over a specific period (usually the current year).
The Gross Profit equals the revenues from sales minus the cost of goods
sold.
Operating Expenses (OPEX) include administration, sales and R&D
salaries as well as rent and utilities, miscellaneous costs, insurances, …
anything beyond the costs of products sold.
The Balance Sheet is a snapshot of the company’s finances at a specific
date (as opposed to the Profit and Loss which is an analysis over a
period)
Assets represent the company’s wealth, things it owns. Fixed assets
includes building and offices, current assets include bank accounts and
cash. A client owing money is an asset. An employee is not an asset.
Liabilities are obligations from past events that the company will have to
pay in the future (utility bills, debts, unpaid suppliers).
Equity is the amount of the funds contributed by the owners (founders or
shareholders) plus previously retained earnings (or losses).
Each year, net profits (or losses) are reported to retained earnings.
What is owned (an asset) has been financed through debts to reimburse
(liabilities) or equity (profits, capital).A difference is made between
buying an assets (e.g. a building) and expenses (e.g. fuel). Assets have
an intrinsic value over time, versus expenses having value in them being
consumed for the company to “work”
Chart of Accounts
The chart of accounts lists all the accounts, whether they are balance
sheet accounts or P&L accounts. Every financial transaction (e.g. a
payment, an invoice) impacts accounts by moving value from one
account (credit) to an other account (debit).
Journal Entries
Every financial document of the company (e.g. an invoice, a bank
statement, a pay slip, a capital increase contract) is recorded as a journal
entry, impacting several accounts.For a journal entry to be balanced, the
sum of all its debits must be equal to the sum of all its credits
Reconciliation
Reconciliation is the process of linking journal items of a specific
account, matching credits and debits.Its primary purpose is to link
payments to their related invoices in order to mark invoices that are paid
and clear the customer statement. This is done by doing a reconciliation
on the Accounts Receivable account.An invoice is marked as paid when
its Accounts Receivable journal items are reconciled with the related
payment journal items.Reconciliation is performed automatically by the
system when:
the payment is registered directly on the invoice
the links between the payments and the invoices are detected at the bank
matching process
Bank Reconciliation
Bank reconciliation is the matching of bank statement lines (provided by
your bank) with transactions recorded internally (payments to suppliers
or from customers). For each line in a bank statement, it can be:
matched with a previously recorded payment:
a payment is registered when a check is received from a customer, then
matched when checking the bank statement
recorded as a new payment:
the payment’s journal entry is created and reconciled with the related
invoice when processing the bank statement
recorded as another transaction:
bank transfer, direct charge, etc.
Odoo should automatically reconcile most transactions, only a few of
them should need manual review. When the bank reconciliation process
is finished, the balance on the bank account in Odoo should match the
bank statement’s balance.

Accrual and Cash Basis Methods

Odoo supports both accrual and cash basis reporting. This allows you to
report income / expense at the time transactions occur (i.e., accrual
basis), or when payment is made or received (i.e., cash basis).

Multi-companies
Odoo allows one to manage several companies within the same
database. Each company has its own chart of accounts and rules. You
can get consolidation reports following your consolidation rules.
Users can access several companies but always work in one company at
a time.
Multi-currencies
Every transaction is recorded in the default currency of the company.
For transactions occurring in another currency, Odoo stores both the
value in the currency of the company and the value in the currency of
the transaction. Odoo can generate currencies gains and losses after the
reconciliation of the journal items.

Currency rates are updated once a day using a yahoo.com online web-
service.
International Standards
Odoo accounting supports more than 50 countries. The Odoo core
accounting implements accounting standards that are common to all
countries. Specific modules exist per country for the specificities of the
country like the chart of accounts, taxes, or bank interfaces.
In particular, Odoo's core accounting engine supports:
Anglo-Saxon Accounting (U.S., U.K.,, and other English-speaking
countries including Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) where
costs of good sold are reported when products are sold/delivered.
European accounting where expenses are accounted at the supplier bill.
Storno accounting (Italy) where refund invoices have negative
credit/debit instead of a reverting the original journal items.
Odoo also have modules to comply with IFRS rules.

Accounts Receivable & Payable

By default, Odoo uses a single account for all account receivable entries
and one for all accounts payable entries. You can create separate
accounts per customers/suppliers, but you don't need to.
As transactions are associated to customers or suppliers, you get reports
to perform analysis per customer/supplier such as the customer
statement, revenues per customers, aged receivable/payables, ...

Wide range of financial reports

In Odoo, you can generate financial reports in real time. Odoo's reports
range from basic accounting reports to advanced management reports.
Odoo's reports include:
Performance reports (such as Profit and Loss, Budget Variance)
Position reports (such as Balance Sheet, Aged Payables, Aged
Receivables)
Cash reports (such as Bank Summary)
Detail reports (such as Trial Balance and General Ledger)
Management reports (such as Budgets, Executive Summary)
Odoo's report engine allows you to customize your own report based on
your own formulae.

Import bank feeds automatically

Bank reconciliation is a process that matches your bank statement lines,
as supplied by the bank, to your accounting transactions in the general
ledger. Odoo makes bank reconciliation easy by frequently importing
bank statement lines from your bank directly into your Odoo account.
This means you can have a daily view of your cashflow without having
to log into your online banking or wait for your paper bank statements.
Odoo speeds up bank reconciliation by matching most of your imported
bank statement lines to your accounting transactions. Odoo also
remembers how you've treated other bank statement lines and provides
suggested general ledger transactions.

Calculate the tax you owe your tax authority

Odoo totals all your accounting transactions for your tax period and uses
these totals to calculate your tax obligation. You can then check your
sales tax by running Odoo's Tax Report.

Inventory Valuation
Odoo support both periodic (manual) and perpetual (automated)
inventory valuations. The available methods are standard price, average
price, LIFO (for countries allowing it) and FIFO.
International accounting standards define several ways to compute
product costs:

 Standard Price
 Average Price
 FIFO
 LIFO (not accepted in IFRS
The costing method is defined on the product form: standard, average or
real price.For “real price”, the costing is further refined by the removal
strategy (on the warehouse location or product category), FIFO by
default.
Periodic Inventory Valuation
In a periodic inventory valuation, goods reception and outgoing
shipments have no direct impact in the accounting. At the end of the
month or year, the accountant post one journal entry representing the
value of the physical inventory.
At the end of the month/year, the company do a physical inventory (or
just rely on the inventory in Odoo). They multiply the quantity of each
product by its cost to know the inventory value of the company.
Perpetual Inventory Valuation
In a perpetual inventory valuation, goods reception and outgoing
shipments are directly posted in the accounting. The inventory valuation
is always up-to-date.

Easy retained earnings

Retained earnings are the portion of income retained by your business.
Odoo automatically calculates your current year earnings in real time so
no year-end journal or rollover is required. This is calculated by
reporting the profit and loss balance to your balance sheet report
automatically.

From Invoice to Payment Collection

Odoo supports multiple invoicing and payment workflows, so you can
choose and use the ones that match your business needs. Whether you
want to accept a single payment for a single invoice, or process a
payment spanning multiple invoices and taking discounts for early
payments, you can do so efficiently and accurately.
From Draft Invoice to Profit and Loss
If we pick up at the end of a typical 'order to cash' scenario, after the
goods have been shipped, you will: issue an invoice; receive payment;
deposit that payment at the bank; make sure the Customer Invoice is
closed; follow up if Customers are late; and finally present your Income
on the Profit and Loss report and show the decrease in Assets on the
Balance Sheet report.
Invoicing in most countries occurs when a contractual obligation is met.
If you ship a box to a customer, you have met the terms of the contract
and can bill them. If your supplier sends you a shipment, they have met
the terms of that contract and can bill you. Therefore, the terms of the
contract is fulfilled when the box moves to or from the truck. At this
point, Odoo supports the creation of what is called a Draft Invoice by
Warehouse staff.

Invoice creation
Draft invoices can be manually generated from other documents such as
Sales Orders, Purchase Orders,etc. Although you can create a draft
invoice directly if you would like.
An invoice must be provided to the customer with the necessary
information in order for them to pay for the goods and services ordered
and delivered. It must also include other information needed to pay the
invoice in a timely and precise manner.

Draft invoices
The system generates invoice which are initially set to the Draft state.
While these invoices
remain unvalidated, they have no accounting impact within the system.
There is nothing to stop users from creating their own draft invoices.
Let's create a customer invoice with following information:
  Customer: Agrolait
 Product: iMac
 Quantity: 1
 Unit Price: 100
 Taxes: Tax 15%

The document is composed of three parts:

 the top of the invoice, with customer information,

 the main body of the invoice, with detailed invoice lines,
 the bottom of the page, with detail about the taxes, and the totals.
Open or Pro-forma invoices
An invoice will usually include the quantity and price the of goods
and/or services, the date, any parties involved, the unique invoice
number, and any tax information.
"Validate" the invoice when you are ready to approve it. The invoice
then moves from the Draft state to the Open state.
When you have validated an invoice, Odoo gives it a unique number
from a defined, and modifiable, sequence.

Accounting entries corresponding to this invoice are automatically

generated when you validate the invoice. You can see the details by
clicking on the entry in the Journal Entry field in the "Other Info" tab.
Send the invoice to customer
After validating the customer invoice, you can directly send it to the
customer via the 'Send by email' functionality.

A typical journal entry generated from a validated invoice will look like
as follows:
Account Partner Due date Debit Credit

Accounts Receivable Agrolait 01/07/2015 115

Taxes Agrolait 15

Sales 100

Payment
In Odoo, an invoice is considered to be paid when the associated
accounting entry has been reconciled with the payment entries. If there
has not been a reconciliation, the invoice will remain in the Open state
until you have entered the payment.
A typical journal entry generated from a payment will look like as
follows:

Account Partner Due date Debit Credit

Bank Agrolait 115

Accounts Receivable Agrolait 115

Receive a partial payment through the bank statement

You can manually enter your bank statements in Odoo, or you can
import them in from a csv file or from several other predefined formats
according to your accounting localisation.
Create a bank statement from the accounting dashboard with the related
journal and enter an amount of $100 .

Reconcile
Now let's reconcile!
You can now go through every transaction and reconcile them or you
can mass reconcile with instructions at the bottom.
After reconciling the items in the sheet, the related invoice will now
display "You have outstanding payments for this customer. You can
reconcile them to pay this invoice. "
Apply the payment. Below, you can see that the payment has been added
to the invoice.
Payment Followup
There's a growing trend of customers paying bills later and later.
Therefore, collectors must make every effort to collect money and
collect it faster.
Odoo will help you define your follow-up strategy. To remind customers
to pay their outstanding invoices, you can define different actions
depending on how severely overdue the customer is. These actions are
bundled into follow-up levels that are triggered when the due date of an
invoice has passed a certain number of days. If there are other overdue
invoices for the same customer, the actions of the most overdue invoice
will be executed.
By going to the customer record and diving into the "Overdue
Payments" you will see the follow-up message and all overdue invoices.
Customer aging report:
The customer aging report will be an additional key tool for the collector
to understand the customer credit issues, and to prioritize their work.
Use the aging report to determine which customers are overdue and
begin your collection efforts.

Profit and loss

The Profit and Loss statement displays your revenue and expense
details. Ultimately, this gives you a clear image of your Net Profit and
Loss. It is sometimes referred to as the "Income Statement" or
"Statement of Revenues and Expenses."

Balance sheet
The balance sheet summarizes the your company's liabilities, assets and
equity at a specific moment in time.

Once vendor bills are registered in Odoo, you can easily pay vendors for
the correct amount and at the right time (not too late, not too early;
depending on your vendor policy). Odoo also offers reports to track your
aged payable balances.
If you want to control vendor bills received from your vendors, you can
use the Odoo Purchase application that allows you to control and pre-
complete them automatically based on past purchase orders.

From Vendor Bill to Payment

Record a new vendor bill

When a vendor bill is received, you can record it from Purchases ‣
Vendor Bills in the Accounting application. As a shortcut, you can also
use the New Bill feature on the accounting dashboard.

To register a new vendor bill, start by selecting a vendor and inputting

their invoice as the Vendor Reference, then add and confirm the
product lines, making sure to have the right product quantities, taxes and
prices.
Save the invoice to update the pre tax and tax amounts at the bottom of
the screen. You will most likely need to configure the prices of your
products without taxes as Odoo will compute the tax for you.
Note
On the bottom left corner, Odoo shows a summary table of all taxes on
the vendor bill. In several countries, different methods are accepted to
round the totals (round per line, or round globally). The default rounding
method in Odoo is to round the final prices per line (as you may have
different taxes per product. E.g. Alcohol and cigarettes). However if
your vendor has a different tax amount on their bill, you can change the
amount in the bottom left table to adjust and match.

Validate The Vendor Bill

Once the vendor bill is validated, a journal entry will be generated based
on the configuration on the invoice. This journal entry may differ
depending on the the accounting package you choose to use.
For most European countries, the journal entry will use the following
accounts:

 Accounts Payable: defined on the vendor form

 Taxes: defined on the products and per line
 Expenses: defined on the line item product used

For Anglo-Saxon (US) accounting, the journal entry will use the
following accounts:

 Accounts Payable: defined on the vendor form

 Taxes: defined on the products and per line
 Goods Received: defined on the product form

You can check your Profit & Loss or the Balance Sheet reports after
having validated a couple of vendor bills to see the impact on your
general ledger.

Pay a bill
To create a payment for an open vendor bill directly, you can click
on Register a Payment at the top of the form.
From there, you select the payment method (i.e. Checking account,
credit card, check, etc…) and the amount you wish to pay. By default,
Odoo will propose the entire remaining balance on the bill for payment.
In the memo field, we recommend you set the vendor invoice number as
a reference (Odoo will auto fill this field from the from the vendor bill if
set it correctly).
Note
You can also register a payment to a vendor directly without applying it
to a vendor bill. To do that, Purchases ‣ Payments. Then, from the
vendor bill you will be able to reconcile this payment with directly.

Printing vendor Cheques

If you choose to pay your vendor bills by check, Odoo offers a method
to do so directly from your vendor payments within Odoo. Whether you
do so on a daily basis or prefer to do so at the end of the week, you can
print in checks in batches.
If you have checks to print, Odoo's accounting dashboard acts as a to do
list and reminds you of how many checks you have left to be printed.
By selecting the amount of checks to be printed, you can dive right into
a list of all payments that are ready to be processed.
Select all the checks you wish to print (use the first checkbox to select
them all) and set the action to Print Checks. Odoo will ask you to set
the next check number in the sequence and will then print all the checks
at once.

Reporting

Aged payable balance

In order to get a list of open vendor bills and their related due dates, you
can use the Aged Payable report, under the reporting menu,
(in Reporting ‣ Business Statement ‣ Aged payable) to get a visual of
all of your outstanding bills.
From here, you can click directly on a vendors name to open up the
details of all outstanding bills and the amounts due, or you can annotate
any line for managements information. At any point in time while you're
looking through the report, you can print directly to Excel or PDF and
get exactly what you see on the screen.
For example, if you manage your inventory using the perpetual
accounting method, you should expect a decrease in account "Current
Assets" once the material has been shipped to the customer.
How to import data into Odoo
You can import data on any Odoo's business object using either Excel
(.xlsx) or CSV (.csv) formats: contacts, products, bank statements,
journal entries and even orders.

How to Import from Another Application

In order to re-create relationships between different records, you should
use the unique identifier from the original application and map it to the
ID (External ID) column in Odoo. When you import another record that
links to the first one, use XXX/ID (XXX/External ID) to the original
unique identifier. You can also find this record using its name but you
will be stuck if at least 2 records have the same name.
The ID will also be used to update the original import if you need to re-
import modified data later, it's thus good practice to specify it whenever
possible.

Periods and Financial Years

Note

Periods and Fiscal Years

A fiscal year (or financial year) corresponds to twelve months for a

company. In many countries, the fiscal year corresponds to a calendar
year. That may not be the case in other countries.
The financial year can be divided into monthly or three-monthly
accounting periods (when you have a quarterly declaration).

Odoo's management of the fiscal year is flexible enough to enable you to

work on several years at the same time. This gives you several
advantages, such as the possibility to create three-year budgets.

Defining Accounting Periods

Defining a Period or a Financial Year
To define your fiscal year, use the menu Settings Configuration
Invoicing, If there is no fiscal year define for your company then this
form offer you to configure fiscal year for your company under the label
No Fiscal Year Define for This Company you have to define your
company fiscal year range and period and click on Apply button.

Defining a Financial Year configuration

You can create several years in advance to define long-term budgets, use
the menu Accounting Configuration Periods Fiscal Years, click
on Create First enter the date of the first day and the last day of your
fiscal year. Then, to create the periods, click one of the two buttons
depending on whether you want to create twelve 1-month or four 3-
months periods:
Defining a Financial Year and Periods
Create Monthly Periods ,
Create 3 Months Periods .

Odoo automatically creates an opening period to allow you to post your

outstanding balances from the previous fiscal year. Notice the
Opening/Closing Period checkbox for such a period.
To close a fiscal year you can also use the menu Accounting
Periodical Processing End of Period Close a Period.
Closing a Period
To close a financial period, for example when a tax declaration has been
made, go to the menu Accounting Configuration Periods Periods,
Select those period(s) which you want to close and from top centered
More button click on Close a Period then select Check this box and on
Close Period button. You can also close period from form view of
Periods by clicking on Close Period button.
Opening Closed Periods
The system administrator can re-open a period, which have been closed
by mistake.
When a period is closed, you can no longer create or modify any
transactions in that period. Closing a period is not obligatory, and you
could easily leave periods open.
To close an accounting period you can also use the menu Accounting
Periodical Processing End of Period Close a Period.

Setting the company information

We have entered both a customer and a product. However, before we
create a sales order, we still have some work to do in setting up our
company. Currently, Odoo does not even know the name of our
company and has, by default, used YourCompany as the name.
It takes a few steps, but we can locate the company information by
choosing Settings from the top menu and then choosing General Settings
from the sub-menu on the left. In the form that comes up you will find a
link at the far right labeled Configure your company data.

Click the link and you are presented with the settings for your company.
The following screenshot shows company record filled with the data for
our sample case study:

Posting Methods
The posting method determines how transactions are processed to
journals and the general ledger.
Real-Time Posting: Transactions are posted to the journals and the
general ledger when Save button is selected after they are entered. This
method can save you time and is best for most business and network
environments. Most companies use this method.
Batch Posting: Transactions are saved by the program and posted in a
group when Save button is selected after they are entered. In this kind of
posting the transactions are accumulated and processed or posted at
interval s of time, daily, weekly or end of accounting period such as
monthly or yearly.
SmartPosting: Transactions are saved by the program and then
automatically posted by the SmartPosting service. The service regularly
cycles through the database looking for transactions to post. You do not
have to actively post the transactions since the service does it for you.
This method is recommended for better performance.

How to Define New Taxes in Odoo?

Most of the countries have tax system to support many national needs.
So tax feature is a must-have in every accounting system.
In Odoo we can create the different types of taxes. But you have to be an
advisor level user to do this in Odoo. Other groups are accounting can
only have the read access to this.
To create a new tax or list out all the taxes in your Odoo, go
to Accounting > Configuration > Accounting > Taxes
In the above picture, you can see the mandatory fields for a tax.
Tax Name
Name of the tax
Tax Scope
Where to use this tax. If you select ‘None’, you can only use this tax
with other tax groups.
Tax computation
Odoo have four different types of tax computation

 Group of taxes
 Fixed
 Percentage of price
 Percentage of price tax included
Amount
Some other options are
Tax account
The account that will be used in the invoice tax lines later creates
journal entries using this account. If we leave it empty, then Odoo will
take the default debit/credit account of Journal.
Tax account on refunds.
The account used in case of refund entry.
Label on Invoices
This is used on the invoice report to represent this tax.
Tax Group
Tags
We can add custom tags to create custom reports.
Include in analytic cost
If we set this option, then the amount computed by this tax will assign
to the same analytic account mentioned the invoice line.
Included in price
Set this option if this tax is included in the unit price of the
product/service.

Affect base of subsequent taxes

If you set this option, Base amount of subsequent taxes will be the
sum of current base amount and tax amount of this tax.
Tax adjustment
Set this option if you want this tax to be used in tax adjustment wizard.
Let's go detail with tax computation methods
Group of taxes
This option lets us configure the tax as a collection of many child taxes.
Odoo will make visible the table to select the child taxes when you
select this option as tax computation method.

Fixed
You can give a fixed amount as tax
Example:
Base amount: 1000
Tax rate (value of Amount field): 10
Amount of Tax: 1010
If you set ‘included in price’
Real amount: 990
Tax: 10
 Amount with Tax: 1000
Percentage of price
This is the most common way of tax computation. Let’s us to mention
tax as the percentage
Example:
Base amount: 1000
Tax rate (value of Amount field): 10%
Tax: 100
Amount of Tax: 1100
If you set ‘included in price’
Real amount: 909.09
Tax: 90.91
Amount with Tax: 1000
Percentage of price tax included
This way of calculation is used when your tax is a percentage of the total
price. This option is by default tax included on the price.
Example:
Base amount: 1000
Tax rate (value of Amount field): 10%
Tax: 100
Amount of Tax: 1000 (Tax is already included in price)
These all are the details we have to take care when we configure a tax.
Now you can use these taxes in Product master or product category
master as Customer Tax or Vendor tax. So that whenever you select this
product in a Sale order/Purchase order/ invoice, Odoo will select this tax
automatically for you.
Managing your Customers
What is the difference between a partner (company) and a contact in
Odoo? A Partner represents an entity that you do business with - a
customer, a prospect, or even an employee of your company. In other
CRM applications, a partner (company) is also referred to as an Account.
A Contact represents a person who works for a partner.
Each partner can have an unlimited number of contacts. Odoo also
allows you to have several contacts with the same address type for one
partner. You can easily link several Invoice addresses to a customer, for
instance.
Address Types
If you have recorded several contacts for the same partner (company),
you can tell Odoo which contact will be used in various documents (e.g.
a quotation) by specifying the Address Type .
For example, a partner (company) can have a delivery address that
differs from the company's invoice address. If the Address Types are
correctly assigned, Odoo can automatically select the appropriate
address during the creation of the document – an invoice is addressed to
the contact that has been assigned the Address Type of Invoice,
otherwise to the Default address.
The concept of a partner in Odoo is much more flexible than in many
other management applications. Why is that? Because a partner can be
your supplier and your customer at the same time. As a consequence,
any data you update for that partner will apply to both customer and
supplier! Thanks to this, you no longer need to update your
customer/supplier information several times (or even in several places)
for the same partner.
The partner form contains information about the company, such as its
corporate name, its postal information, its communication information,
its website and the categories the partner belongs to. The partner form is
composed of several tabs.
 the Contact tab contains information about different contacts of
that partner (company).
 the Internal Notes tab is an area for free text notes.
 the Sales & Purchases tab contains information such as the default
salesperson and sales team, whether the partner (company) is
a Customer and/or a Supplier and its primary language.
 the Accouting tab contains information about Fiscal
Position,Account Payable/Receivable,Credit Limit,etc..
The Sales & Purchases of a Customer

Creating and Updating Partners

Before explaining you how to create a partner, just a quick word on the
different ways of representing partners in Odoo. Kanban view shows a
global overview of customers (the default representation when you click
the Customers menu). List view shows a list of customers. In this view,
you can see several customers at a time. Form view is displayed when
you click a specific customer to start editing or when you create a new
customer.
To create a new partner (a company, customer, supplier, ...) use the
menu Sales ‣ Customers(for customers) or the menu Purchases ‣
Suppliers (for suppliers). These menus does not only allow you to create
a new partner, but also to search for partners.
A Customer Form
Mandatory
Blue fields are always mandatory, meaning that you have to enter a
value there. It is impossible to save changes as long as a blue field is not
completed.
You should at least enter the company's Name in the partner form.
Some fields are text fields, other fields may be linked to existing data
that have been entered elsewhere, such as Countries .
Create a customer with the following data:
 Name : Smith and Offspring ,
 Customer checkbox : checked , in the Sales & Purchases tab,
 Supplier checkbox : unchecked , in the Sales & Purchases tab,
 Contact Name : Stephen Smith , in the Contacts tab
 Type : Default ,
 Save the form.
Email
If you use the email gateway, the Outlook or the Thunderbird plugin, do
not forget to register an email addresses to each contact.
To update a partner, open the corresponding form, select Edit and
change the required fields. As explained before, when a company is both
one of your customers and a supplier, you just have to edit the partner
form once to have changes applied to both customer and supplier.
Checkboxes
Why is it important for you to correctly set the Customer and Supplier
checkboxes in the partner form? These checkboxes are designed to
enable Odoo to quickly select the partners who should be displayed in
some drop-down boxes. An example: when you select a partner in a
Sales Quotation, Odoo will only allow you to select from the list of
Customers. And that is precisely what the Customer checkbox is used
for.

Managing your Contacts

You can have several contacts for one partner. Contacts represent
company employees that you are in touch with, along with their address
details. For each address you can indicate the type
( Default , Invoice , Delivery , Contact or Other ).
Contacts can be entered into the Contacts tab of the Customer form. Or
you can also create a new partner and assign a company on that partner
which will make this partner as a contact on that partner (company).

Customizing Partner Fields

Odoo also allows you to customize the Partner view to your needs.
Click the Manage Views option if you want to add fields, delete fields or
change the order of fields in a view.
Let us add the Birthday field to a contact, in the Customers form view.
To do so, click on the logged in user at top-right and select About
Odoo and then select Activate the developer mode.Now go to the Sales ‣
Customers menu and open any customer in Form view. Click on Debug
View# and then select Manage Views, then Edit because the
corresponding view will already be preselected.
Go to the last line of the view and click the blue plus (+) sign to add a
field to the Contacts view. Proceed as in the figure below, then click
the Update button.

Add the Birthday Field for a Contact

In the Properties screen that appears, click on the New Field through
which you can change the label to Birthday in the String field. To
indicate that a new field can be used in the corresponding search view,
make sure to select Always Searchable . Click the Update button to
confirm your changes. Click Preview to see your result.
The Birthday field will now appear in your Customers form view -->
Contacts tab --> Create/Open any contact, ready to be used. You can
also customize the actions .

Performing Actions on Customers

At the right side of the Customers form view, you will find
button( Quotations and Sales ). You can perform actions(by clicking on
the More at the top) and print reports(by clicking on the Print at the
top) both from List and from Form view, List view allowing you to do
actions for several partners at the same time. You can also add an
attachment.
Actions
To display the list of possible actions, just select one or more customers.
You can create a new opportunity for a customer, or start a mass
mailing. Mass mailings will usually be started from list view, because
you will select several partners at a time.
Campaigns
For mass mailings, you might prefer to use the Direct Marketing
application, which offers great functionalities (please refer to
chapter Driving your Marketing Campaigns).

Finding your Partners using Filters

Open the Customers list view to discover the search options(top-right)
allowing you to easily filter your partners.You can group
by Salesman to see which customers have already been assigned a
salesman or not.And can also group by Company . You can filter
by Persons to see the customers you are responsible for. You can also
filter by My Partners, Companies, Customers and Suppliers.
Limit
If you want to display more than 80 partners displayed by default, click
the 1 to 80 of 80 option at the top of the screen to be able to change
the limit.
Filters also allow you to quickly set lists of customers for which you
want to do specific actions. Through the New Filter option, you can
also add your own filters for any field related to the Customer form.
Filters
You can easily create your own frequently used filters by prefiltering the
data the way you want and then using the Save Filter option.

Categorizing your Partners

Odoo uses categories to organize all of its partners according to their
relationship with your company (partner, prospect, supplier, and so on).
Each partner may be attached to several categories. To open the list of
available partner categories, use the menu Sales ‣ Configuration ‣
Address Book ‣ Partner Tags.

List of Partner Categories

Categories
To create a new category, go to the menu Sales ‣ Configuration ‣
Address Book ‣ Partner Tags and click the Create button.
Because categories can be organized according to a tree structure, you
can apply an action at any level of the structure: a marketing promotion
activity, for example, can be applied either to all customers, or
selectively only to customers in one category and its subcategories.
You can create your own categories and assign them to your partner
from the Customer form.

Maintaining inventory items

Inventory is the physical supplies you sell or use to provide services as
part of your business. Your inventory is one of your most valuable
assets, and keeping track of it accurately is essential to running your
business smoothly. Whether you use an electronic inventory tracking
system or do everything yourself manually, maintaining accurate
inventory records will contribute to your business' success.
Generally, inventory types can be grouped into four classifications: raw
material, work-in-process, finished goods, and MRO (maintenance,
repair, operations) goods.
Inventory control is also important to maintaining the right balance of
stock in your warehouses. ... Too much inventory can trigger profit
losses––whether a product expires, gets damaged, or goes out of season.
Key to proper inventory control is a deeper understanding of customer
demand for your products.
The importance of inventory control is to minimise the blockage of
financial resources. It reduces the unnecessary tying up of capital in
excess inventories. ... By ensuring timely availability of adequate supply
of goods, inventory control helps the firm as well as consumers.
Inventory control protects a company from fluctuations in demand of its
products. It enables a company to provide better services to its
customers. It keeps a smooth flow of raw-materials and aids in
continuing production operations. It checks and maintains the right stock
and reduces the risk of loss.