The accounting team of Estampa, operating in the hospitality sector, reached out to discuss how they could organize their accounting processes using Odoo. They contact me through referrals from previous clients with whom we’ve successfully implemented Odoo solutions over the years.
This was a three-and-a-half-month project. My main task involved conducting an initial analysis to assess needs and recommend the implementation of Odoo. As the Project Coordinator, I established and negotiated the offer along with the implementation plan, ensuring it aligned with the client's requirements. I oversaw the overall implementation to ensure adherence to the plan and the agreed-upon budget.
I collaborated with a team of three specialists to execute the on-site diagnosis and deliver training sessions, ensuring effective knowledge transfer and tool assimilation for the client.
What they ask
The Estampa team manages numerous small operations, requiring monthly reconciliation of partner accounts. Each month, they suffered as they put in significant effort to balance these accounts using an Excel file system, pulling data from email communications. This process was overwhelmingly cumbersome and frustratingly inefficient, leaving the accounting team exhausted and stressed.
They wanted a system to track ongoing operations and directly provide accounting information to the accounting system, allowing the accounting department to finally breathe and focus on financial optimization.
Insights Gained from Initial Discussions
As a hospitality enterprise, they experience seasonal fluctuations, leading to a period of reduced operations. They wanted to take advantage of this downtime, aiming to assimilate the new system within a maximum of three months. In our preliminary study, we found that too much effort was needed to locate essential info due to multiple reception channels and a lack of specialized communication channels. This situation forced the sales team to sift through messages for new requests, while the accounting team struggled to find the information needed for invoicing. As a result, they sometimes didn't locate critical info in time. This communication problem affected other processes as well, making it a real odyssey to locate key information.
To meet the timeline for the desired implementation, we adjusted the scope and concentrated on the most impactful areas the team could assimilate: the accounting process and communication with the sales team. On the other hand, assimilating an ERP across the enterprise requires significant effort from many team members, which can be expensive and exhausting if all fronts are tackled simultaneously.
This targeted approach reduce the scope with a direct impact in the cost and would lay the groundwork for future integration of CRM and Sales processes.
Based on this idea, the essential need was the accounting functions. Therefore, we recommended starting with Odoo Enterprise in the cloud through Odoo.com, using the single application license and activating the Invoicing module, which includes discussions and calendar functions.
This way, they could benefit from no upfront installation costs since they can use Odoo’s cloud. They would gain access to the basics of Odoo, including messaging, calendar, and documents. With just the accounting module, the entire team could use the system thanks to the unlimited user feature included in this license. This also led to further optimization of acquisition costs. This also gives them time to consider which additional modules to add later when they’re ready to assimilate them.
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Restrictions and Quality Dimension
The client ask to include on-site sessions in the training plan to assure a better comprehension to the employed with less experience in ERP systems.
The acceptance criteria was
At this moment, the timeline was fixed, the main points of the scope were adjusted, and the quality criteria were defined. There was just one thing left to complete the proposal: a high-level plan needed to be established to identify the necessary resources and determine the budget.
The proposed project plan aimed to implement Odoo’s accounting system while streamlining the communications workflow, starting with the accounting and sales departments.
This approach aimed to help them organize their accounting processes and understand the basic functionalities of Odoo ERP, which are consistent across all its modules. By establishing this foundation, we set the stage for future implementations, creating a base for the later assimilation of additional Odoo modules for other departments.
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Mitigating risk from the start:
From prior experiences, I understood the additional workload associated with adopting a new system. New operations coincide with loading the new system, resulting in double work for a period.
To mitigate this issue, we suggest a Cutover Strategy: establishing the cutover date as the start date in the new system for the initial accounting period.
Taking this date into consideration, new operations for the new period should be registered in the Odoo Invoicing module to directly provide information for the Journal Entries. In addition the accounting balance should be completed for operations prior to the closing date, loading only this results as the "Opening Balance" for the new period in the new system.
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This strategy was incorporated in the implementation plan with the two stages:
Stage 1: Communication Functions
Stage 2: Accounting Record Functions