See the margin on every shipment file, inside Odoo.
Every sector has one process that generic ERP handles badly. Landed cost is estimated, so margins are a guess until year end. We start there, because fixing that is what makes the rest of the rollout worth doing.
—— Where it hurts
What usually breaks first.
Shipment files close before the costs arrive
One sea-freight job collects charges from half a dozen vendors — ocean freight, THC, customs clearance, trucking, D/O fees — and those invoices land two to six weeks after the container is delivered. Until the last bill arrives, the file's margin is a guess, accruals live in Excel, and the per-job P&L is only trusted at year end. Odoo's analytic accounts put every revenue and cost line on the shipment the day it is known, with accrued estimates for the rest.
3PL stock that isn't yours to count
A 3PL warehouse holds customers' goods, but a standard inventory setup values them as your own stock — so the balance sheet is wrong and the storage bill is built by hand. Monthly billing runs — pallet-days, inbound and outbound handling, repacks — get assembled from WMS exports into Excel, and a disputed line takes days to trace. Odoo Inventory records the owner on every receipt, so stock reports split by customer and the billing run comes from actual movements.
Invoices that wait for paper PODs
The trip is done but the signed POD is still in the truck cab, so the invoice waits — and the detention or extra-drop charges scribbled on that paper never make it onto the bill. Trip costs — fuel, tolls, driver allowances — sit in a separate book, so nobody knows which lanes or customers actually pay. Odoo captures the signature on the delivery order from a phone at the drop, so invoicing starts the same day.
—— Where you start
Three starting points we see most.
Where you start · 01
From spreadsheets
Orders, stock and costing live in files only one person understands. We move the highest-risk sheet first, so value lands in weeks, not quarters.
Where you start · 02
From a legacy system
The old ERP still runs, but nobody dares change it. We migrate in validated batches while it keeps trading, with a rollback point at every step.
Where you start · 03
Adding a site or a company
Growth broke the single-database assumption. We restructure for multi-company, multi-warehouse and consolidated books without stopping operations.
—— Modules
The modules this sector actually starts with.
- Inventory
- Purchase
- Accounting
- Barcode
—— How the rollout runs
A sector template, tuned to how you actually work.
Walk the process
We follow one real order end to end — quote to cash, or purchase to pay — before touching a configuration screen.
Configure the sector baseline
The modules this sector starts with go in first, configured against your master data rather than demo records.
Pilot with one team
One site, one team, one month. The pilot decides what scales, and its objections reshape the template before anything else ships.
Scale and hand over
Remaining sites onboard on a fixed rhythm, each with documentation and a trained super-user of its own.
—— Related
Explore what else we do.
—— FAQ
Questions teams ask about this service.
Can we see profit per shipment file, not just per month?
Yes — this is the core of a forwarding setup. Each job gets its own analytic account; sell rates, buy rates and vendor bills are coded to it, and expected costs are accrued when the job closes. You see the file's margin the day the container is delivered, not when the last vendor invoice arrives. That deliverable goes into the fixed written scope for phase one.
We run a 3PL warehouse — the stock belongs to our customers. Does Odoo handle that?
Yes. Odoo Inventory records an owner on received stock, so customer goods never enter your own valuation and reports split cleanly by client. Storage billing — pallet-days, handling charges — is usually a small customisation on top, and we quote it as a fixed written scope so you know the cost before we build it.
Does Odoo replace our TMS or carrier tracking?
Mostly no, and we will say so upfront. Odoo does not do route optimisation or live GPS out of the box. The pattern that works is Odoo as the commercial and financial record — quotes, jobs, billing, vendor costs — integrated by API with your TMS or carrier tracking where the data earns it. Customs filing stays in the broker's specialised software; Odoo records the charges.
Let's find out whether Odoo actually fits your business.
A short call, an honest answer. If it isn't the right system for you, we'll say so.