Setting up Odoo is not difficult. Setting it up in the wrong order is expensive.<\/p>\n
Some settings can be changed any time. Others become very hard once you have transaction history \u2014 Odoo will either block the change or require you to clear records first.<\/p>\n
This article puts the irreversible decisions first.<\/strong> That is the whole point of it.<\/p>\n Two things to have ready. Neither is a software task.<\/p>\n Your chart of accounts, agreed with your accountant.<\/strong> Not a draft. Agreed.<\/p>\n A written description of how an order actually moves through your business<\/strong> \u2014 enquiry to cash, and purchase to payment, including the exceptions.<\/p>\n Companies that skip these configure on assumptions and discover the gaps three months later.<\/p>\n Settings \u2192 Users & Companies \u2192 Companies.<\/p>\n What to set:<\/strong><\/p>\n The currency warning.<\/strong> Your company currency is set once and is extremely difficult to change afterwards. Every transaction is stored against it.<\/p>\n Get this right now.<\/strong> If you trade in multiple currencies, your company currency is your reporting currency \u2014 the one your accounts are presented in \u2014 not the one you invoice most often.<\/p>\n FIGURE 1: THE FOUR DECISIONS THAT ARE HARD TO REVERSE<\/p>\n Company currency<\/p>\n Chart of accounts<\/p>\n Units of measure<\/p>\n Stock valuation method<\/p>\n Odoo installs a country-specific accounting package containing the standard chart of accounts, tax rates and statutory report formats.<\/p>\n Install the right country package before entering anything.<\/strong><\/p>\n Then review the chart of accounts with your accountant.<\/p>\n Two pieces of advice:<\/strong><\/p>\n Do not over-detail it.<\/strong> A separate account for every product category feels thorough and makes your profit and loss unreadable. Use analytic accounting<\/strong> for that breakdown instead \u2014 it gives you the detail without cluttering the ledger.<\/p>\n Match how you report.<\/strong> The structure should mirror what your board, bank and auditor actually want to see.<\/p>\n Taxes<\/strong> define your rates and which accounts they post to. The localisation package sets up the standard ones.<\/p>\n Fiscal positions<\/strong> decide which tax applies to which customer \u2014 domestic versus export, registered versus unregistered, any special treatment where you operate.<\/p>\n Test this properly.<\/strong> Take a period you have already filed manually and check Odoo’s tax report against it. If they match, you can trust the setup. This is a half-day that saves a great deal of trouble.<\/p>\n Create individual accounts. Never shared logins \u2014 they destroy every audit trail Odoo keeps.<\/p>\n Think in roles, not people.<\/strong> Define what a salesperson should be able to do, then add people to that group.<\/p>\n Keep administrator to one or two people.<\/strong> During setup everyone needs broad access to test. The mistake is never tightening it afterwards, and it is extremely common.<\/p>\n If you hold stock, design this before importing anything.<\/p>\n Keep it flat.<\/strong> A structure with six levels looks thorough and becomes a burden \u2014 every extra level is extra work on every transaction.<\/p>\n Model only what you manage.<\/strong> If your team never picks by shelf, do not create shelf locations.<\/p>\n Set your delivery and receipt steps.<\/strong> One-step is right for most small warehouses. Two or three steps if you genuinely pack or inspect as separate operations.<\/p>\n Decide this before importing products.<\/strong><\/p>\n Every product has a base unit \u2014 pieces, kilograms, metres, litres. All your stock, costs and reports are expressed in it.<\/p>\n Odoo blocks changing a product’s base unit once it has transaction history.<\/strong> Getting around that means clearing records on a live system, which is a serious operation.<\/p>\n If you buy in boxes and hold in pieces, Odoo supports a separate purchase unit with a conversion factor. Set that up rather than compromising the base unit.<\/p>\n FIGURE 2: THE ORDER TO SET THINGS UP<\/p>\n Company and currency<\/p>\n Accounts and taxes<\/p>\n Structure<\/p>\n Data<\/p>\n Two decisions, both with accounting consequences. Take them with your accountant.<\/strong><\/p>\n Costing method.<\/strong> Standard price, average cost, or FIFO.<\/p>\n Valuation posting.<\/strong> Manual means your accountant posts inventory adjustments periodically. Automatic means every stock move posts an accounting entry immediately.<\/p>\n Automatic is usually right<\/strong> if you are serious about accounting \u2014 your balance sheet inventory always matches stock on hand. It also means bad stock data becomes bad financial data instantly, with no buffer.<\/p>\n Now import.<\/p>\n In this order:<\/strong> products and categories, customers and suppliers, opening balances, opening stock, open orders.<\/p>\n Clean before importing, not after.<\/strong> Merge duplicate customers. Fix product costs. Make units consistent. Complete required fields.<\/p>\n Odoo imports from CSV or Excel and can match on an external ID<\/strong> \u2014 use those, so a re-run updates records rather than creating duplicates.<\/p>\n Set your document numbering before going live \u2014 invoices, orders, deliveries.<\/p>\n Two considerations:<\/strong><\/p>\n Some jurisdictions require unbroken sequential invoice numbering. Check what applies to you.<\/p>\n If you are continuing numbering from a previous system, set the starting number now.<\/p>\n The step that gets shortened when a project runs late, and the one that should not be.<\/p>\n Take five real transactions from last month<\/strong> and run them end to end in a test database: quotation, confirm, deliver, invoice, payment. Then a purchase cycle. Then a partial delivery and a short receipt.<\/p>\n Check every journal entry Odoo creates.<\/strong><\/p>\n If the numbers match what actually happened, your configuration is sound. If not, you have found a problem while it is still cheap.<\/p>\n FIGURE 3: SETUPS THAT WORK AND SETUPS THAT CAUSE TROUBLE<\/p>\n Done well<\/p>\n Done in a hurry<\/p>\n Wrong company currency.<\/strong> Effectively permanent.<\/p>\n Units of measure decided per product as you go.<\/strong> The most common expensive error, and it appears months later.<\/p>\n Over-detailed chart of accounts.<\/strong> Produces a profit and loss nobody reads.<\/p>\n Everyone an administrator.<\/strong> Set during testing, never tightened.<\/p>\n Dirty data imported anyway.<\/strong> Because cleaning felt slow. It poisons everything built on top.<\/p>\n Skipping the test cycle.<\/strong> Discovering configuration problems with real customers.<\/p>\n Setup is not hard. The order is what matters.<\/strong><\/p>\n Currency, chart of accounts and units of measure are the decisions you will live with. Take them first, with your accountant, before anything is imported.<\/p>\n Then clean your data, import in the right order, and test five real transactions end to end<\/strong> before anyone relies on it.<\/p>\n Setting up Odoo for the first time?<\/p>\n Get in touch. We will go through the irreversible decisions with you and your accountant before anything is configured \u2014 that hour saves months.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why the order matters Setting up Odoo is not difficult. Setting it up in the wrong order is expensive. Some settings can be changed any time. Others become very hard once you have transaction history \u2014 Odoo will either block the change or require you to clear records first. This article puts the irreversible decisions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9013,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-odoo"],"yoast_head":"\nBefore you touch the system<\/h2>\n
Step 1 \u2014 Company record<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Step 2 \u2014 Localisation and chart of accounts<\/h2>\n
Step 3 \u2014 Taxes and fiscal positions<\/h2>\n
Step 4 \u2014 Users and access rights<\/h2>\n
Step 5 \u2014 Warehouses and locations<\/h2>\n
Step 6 \u2014 Units of measure<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Step 7 \u2014 Stock valuation<\/h2>\n
Step 8 \u2014 Master data<\/h2>\n
Step 9 \u2014 Sequences and numbering<\/h2>\n
Step 10 \u2014 Test before you trust<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
The mistakes that cost most<\/h2>\n
The short version<\/h2>\n