Technology, AI & ERP — explained in plain English
Understand the power and benefits of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for your business. Learn about different ERP platforms, their features, and how they can help you streamline your operations, improve productivity, and gain valuable insights into your data. Stay up-to-date on the latest ERP trends, best practices, and case studies to make informed decisions about your business technology. From small businesses to large enterprises, this category has everything you need to know about ERP and its role in modern business management.
Loyalty cards, gift cards, and eWallets in Odoo POS all run on one program engine shared with Sales and eCommerce. Odoo 20 adds expiring loyalty points and single-use-per-customer discount codes on top of the long-standing register workflows for earning, redeeming, and selling prepaid balances.
The Master Production Schedule turns a planner-controlled demand forecast into manufacturing orders and purchase orders period by period, balancing starting stock, forecasted and indirect demand, safety stock, and replenishment. Odoo 20 strengthens what follows the plan: ASAP scheduling, a redesigned MO Kanban, new work order Gantt and Kanban views, and draft-versus-confirmed MOs from procurement.
Odoo has no monthly period to flip closed — the close is verification, cut-off, and lock dates, in that order. This walkthrough adapts the official 20.0 closing checklist to a monthly rhythm, covering bank consistency, the reconciliation summary report, suspense and aged-item review, tax checks, and advancing the lock date.
Standard support for Odoo 17 ended in September 2026 when Odoo 20 arrived, and the subscription agreement’s covered-version rules add a commercial clock from March 2027. This article sets out the four realistic options — upgrade to 20, step to 19, buy extended support, or stay and self-support — and what a three-version jump actually involves.
Odoo 20 adds a call flow designer to its Phone app, letting businesses build incoming-call routing with extensions, menus, queues, and time- and location-based steps inside the ERP instead of a provider portal. The softphone also gains a floating widget, auto-fill and auto-log, simultaneous calling, and mid-call audio controls.
Odoo 20 lets the browser talk directly to network ePOS printers through Local Network Access, shrinking the IoT box’s role at the counter. This audit guide goes device class by device class — printers, drawers, scanners, scales, displays, terminals — showing what keeps working, what still needs an IoT gateway, and what to replace, starting with Bluetooth printers.
Odoo subcontracting keeps outside work inside the same inventory, costing, and lead-time records as in-house production, across basic, resupply, and dropship models. Odoo 20 adds a subcontracting MO overview with component status, reception valuation from the vendor pricelist when no PO is linked, and component costs in MO cost.
Odoo’s improved duplicate detection flags invoices and bills in two tiers: red for highly likely duplicates that should be corrected, and yellow for possible duplicates to investigate before posting. This guide explains what each colour demands, where duplicates come from, and how to work both warnings into your payment and month-end routines.
POS order-line pricing is computed twice — instantly in the browser and authoritatively on the server. This article maps both sides, from pricelist and fiscal position to tax rounding, and shows how to inject custom pricing logic so the till and the backend never disagree.
Odoo 20 changes the licensing maths for the first time in four years: Standard stays put, Custom rises by roughly 20% from 2027, and a new Light User licence covers self-service staff from EUR 7.90 a month. This guide explains what each plan buys, what no plan includes — notably the IAP credits every AI feature consumes — and how to count your users before renewal.
Odoo 20 lets you assign activities to a role instead of only a person, makes meeting activities more informative, and adds a drag-to-unschedule side panel to calendar views. The Calendar app also gains multiple and shared team calendars, faster Google and Outlook sync, and the Meet with view of colleagues’ calendars.
One database, one product catalogue, and a point of sale configuration per register: Odoo’s multi-location model keeps every store selling from its own stock on shared data. Odoo 20 adds simplified inventory for small sites, multiple printers per POS, multiple currencies at checkout, a restrictive Supervised access level, and cleaner end-of-session accounting for chains.
The Maintenance app turns every stoppage into a tracked request whose duration, work-center blocking, and automatic MTBF and MTTR statistics make downtime measurable instead of anecdotal. Odoo 20 adds dedicated Gantt views for maintenance requests and lets each maintenance team customize its own stages.
Translating a foreign subsidiary’s books at historical, average, and closing rates guarantees an imbalance, and accounting standards park it in equity as the Cumulative Translation Adjustment. Odoo 20 adds an auditable CTA line to the balance sheet, trial balance, and general ledger that balances those discrepancies automatically.
A production upgrade cannot be undone, but Odoo’s upgrade platform will convert a copy of your database into a neutralized Odoo 20 test environment for free. This guide covers the request routes for Online, Odoo.sh, and self-hosted databases, what neutralization disables, and how to test so the rehearsal predicts go-live.
Odoo 20 lets you filter the chatter to show conversations or tracked changes, and emails logged in the chatter now show who was in CC. Underneath, tracking messages are generated on the fly instead of stored — a quiet rebuild with real upgrade implications for custom code.