Odoo Project is not trying to be a heavyweight project planning tool. It has no complex critical path analysis and no elaborate resource levelling.<\/p>\n
What it does have is something more useful for most businesses: tasks connected to the rest of your company.<\/strong><\/p>\n A task can be linked to a customer, generate a timesheet entry, and turn those hours into an invoice. That chain is the reason to run projects inside Odoo rather than in a separate tool.<\/p>\n A project<\/strong> is a container. A customer engagement, an internal initiative, an ongoing service line.<\/p>\n A task<\/strong> is a piece of work inside it, with an owner, a deadline, a description and a stage.<\/p>\n Tasks move through stages<\/strong> on a kanban board. You define the stages, and they should describe what has happened rather than what someone hopes.<\/p>\n A working set for most teams: New, In Progress, In Review, Done. Add stages only when you can say what decision each one supports.<\/p>\n The same rule as the CRM pipeline. Under seven stages, each one a checkable fact.<\/strong><\/p>\n “In Review” is checkable \u2014 either someone is reviewing it or they are not. “Nearly Done” is an opinion, and every person will read it differently.<\/p>\n If this is customer work, decide before you start:<\/p>\n Fixed price.<\/strong> You agreed a price. Timesheets tell you whether you made money, but do not drive the invoice.<\/p>\n Time and materials.<\/strong> You bill hours worked. Timesheets drive the invoice directly.<\/p>\n Milestone.<\/strong> You bill at defined points as work is delivered.<\/p>\n This choice affects how you configure the project and how the sales order links to it. Changing it halfway through an engagement is messy.<\/p>\n If you deliver the same kind of project repeatedly, build a template with the standard task list.<\/p>\n Every new project starts with the tasks already there. It saves setup time and, more importantly, it stops people forgetting steps.<\/p>\n Employees log hours against tasks. Odoo shows planned versus actual on every task and rolls it up to the project.<\/p>\n Two things this gives you.<\/p>\n Billing.<\/strong> With time and materials, logged hours flow into the customer invoice. Log the hours, invoice the hours, no re-entry.<\/p>\n Honesty about cost.<\/strong> Even on fixed-price work, knowing that a job you quoted for forty hours took seventy is how the next quote gets better.<\/p>\n The requirement:<\/strong> people have to actually log time. This is a management commitment. Partial timesheet data is worse than none, because it looks complete and is not.<\/p>\n The link between Sales and Project is what makes this worth doing.<\/p>\n Set a service product to create a task<\/strong> or create a project<\/strong> when the sales order is confirmed. Now selling the work automatically creates the work.<\/p>\n The chain runs: quotation \u2192 sales order \u2192 project and tasks \u2192 timesheets \u2192 invoice.<\/p>\n For a services business, that is the whole operational cycle in one system, with no export at any point.<\/p>\n FIGURE 1: FROM QUOTATION TO INVOICE, THROUGH THE WORK<\/p>\n Quotation<\/p>\n Project and Tasks<\/p>\n Timesheets<\/p>\n Invoice<\/p>\n Sub-tasks.<\/strong> Break a large task down while keeping it linked to the parent.<\/p>\n Recurring tasks.<\/strong> For maintenance or anything on a schedule.<\/p>\n Task dependencies.<\/strong> Mark that one task blocks another. Light, but enough for most work.<\/p>\n Planned hours.<\/strong> Set an estimate on each task. Combined with timesheets, this is where estimation actually improves.<\/p>\n Customer portal access.<\/strong> Let the customer see task progress on shared projects. This eliminates a surprising number of status update emails.<\/p>\n Milestones.<\/strong> Define delivery points, and optionally tie invoicing to them.<\/p>\n Task analysis.<\/strong> Open tasks by stage, owner and deadline. Where things are stuck.<\/p>\n Timesheet analysis.<\/strong> Hours by project, person and task. Where time actually goes.<\/p>\n Project profitability.<\/strong> Revenue against cost of hours logged. The report that tells you which kind of work is worth doing more of.<\/p>\n Planned versus actual hours.<\/strong> Your estimation accuracy. Look at this every quarter and your quoting improves.<\/p>\n That last one is the most valuable and the least used. Most companies estimate badly and never find out by how much.<\/p>\n FIGURE 2: DECIDE THE BILLING MODEL BEFORE THE FIRST TASK<\/p>\n Fixed price<\/p>\n Time and materials<\/p>\n Milestone<\/p>\n Too many stages.<\/strong> People stop moving cards, and the board stops reflecting reality.<\/p>\n Tasks with no owner.<\/strong> Work that belongs to everybody belongs to nobody.<\/p>\n Timesheets half-filled.<\/strong> Half your team logs time. Your profitability report is now confidently wrong.<\/p>\n No planned hours.<\/strong> Without an estimate there is nothing to compare actuals against, and estimation never improves.<\/p>\n Projects that never close.<\/strong> Finished work sitting open for months, cluttering every report. Close them.<\/p>\n Using it as a report for management only.<\/strong> If the team updates the board weekly so someone can run a report, it is a spreadsheet with extra steps. It has to help the person doing the work.<\/p>\n Point 7 is where the value shows up. The first honest comparison of estimated against actual hours is usually uncomfortable and always useful.<\/p>\n Running customer projects and not sure which ones make money?<\/p>\n Get in touch. We connect projects, timesheets and invoicing so profitability is a report rather than a guess.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Where it fits Odoo Project is not trying to be a heavyweight project planning tool. It has no complex critical path analysis and no elaborate resource levelling. What it does have is something more useful for most businesses: tasks connected to the rest of your company. A task can be linked to a customer, generate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-odoo"],"yoast_head":"\nProjects and tasks<\/h2>\n
Setting up a project properly<\/h2>\n
Choose your stages carefully<\/h3>\n
Decide the billing model first<\/h3>\n
Templates for repeat work<\/h3>\n
Timesheets on tasks<\/h2>\n
Connecting projects to sales<\/h2>\n
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Useful features<\/h2>\n
Reports worth using<\/h2>\n
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What usually goes wrong<\/h2>\n
Getting started<\/h2>\n
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