Small steps in Odoo

Even when the reasons to implement ERP are obvious, after pulling the trigger, we might start to wonder whether it was the right decision for the business. Here are the key questions we should be asking:1.  Is it okay that month-end procedures take 7-10 days to complete?2.  Is it normal that making changes during quarterly reporting, particularly during peak reporting season, are painful and time consuming for your staff? 

These are complex and important questions to answer. Even minor inconveniences, such as adjusting entries, can be a warning sign that something is wrong. I’d like to examine a case study on how we can handle these issues using Odoo.

Meet Mary and Richard. Mary’s an accountant who enters expenses into the system and ensures that the numbers are accurate and correct. She needs to maintain communication with her colleagues, and track all costs in a document. One of the required fields in the ERP system is the cost center number, or departmental code, and Mary’s co-workers often forget to include this. Mary spends a lot of time chasing after these forgetful colleagues which can cause delays and can sometimes overload her at work.

Mary became upset with her colleague, Richard, when some “helpful” changes he made to her data entries created twice as much work for her. Richard had only been trying to help by correcting a minor mistake that he had noticed in her work. He had noticed that Mary had entered HR’s cost center code instead of the Marketing team’s code. He knew that Mary was very busy, and decided to give her a hand by adjusting the document himself. Unfortunately, there were other documents linked to the original document, and this led to a series of discrepancies in the system. Let’s have a closer look at the problems with the existing system.