9-part guide
Agencies do not sell software licenses. They sell time, judgement, and outcomes, billed by the hour, the retainer, or the deliverable. The tools below are the Odoo features that move the...
Why this matters
Agencies do not sell software licenses. They sell time, judgement, and outcomes, billed by the hour, the retainer, or the deliverable. The tools below are the Odoo features that move the numbers an agency owner actually reads on Monday morning: utilisation, realised rate, margin per client, and forecast capacity. Skip...
1 of 9
The moment a quotation is signed, an agency project should exist, with the right template, the right billing terms, and the right project manager assigned. Odoo's Sales + Project chain creates the project automatically on order confirmation: service products map to project templates, the SO becomes the contract...
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Selling a 120-hour engagement means knowing, at any moment, how those 120 hours are spent across discovery, design, build, and review. Odoo lets each task carry an allocated hour budget that rolls up to the project total; a Gantt or Kanban view shows planned vs actual at every level. Project managers see overruns the...
3 of 9
Bad timesheets become bad invoices, and bad invoices become collections calls. Odoo's timesheet validation workflow puts a line-by-line approval step between the operator entry and the customer invoice, project managers approve, reject, or reassign hours before they ever touch a billing run. Non-billable hours are...
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Every billable hour, every subcontractor invoice, every expense, every line of the agency P&L can carry an analytic distribution that ties it back to the project, the client, or the practice. The result: margin per client, per project, per service line, calculated continuously rather than reconstructed quarterly in a...
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The Planning module turns the spreadsheet a resource manager runs every Friday into a live, drag-and-drop schedule of who is working on what across the next eight weeks. Each resource has a capacity (hours per week, skills, role), and the heatmap exposes both under-utilised seniors and over-committed juniors before...
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Project work is not the only revenue line, most mature agencies run a retainer book on top of it. Odoo's Helpdesk module models retainer pools, SLA timers per ticket type, and automatic escalation when response or resolution targets slip. Tickets consume retainer hours that feed the same analytic account as the...
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Agencies churn staff faster than any other professional services vertical, and every departure that takes process knowledge with it costs three months of onboarding for the replacement. The Knowledge module gives the agency a structured internal wiki, SOPs, project templates, client briefs, post-mortems, linked from...
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Sales people sell what they are paid to sell, and an agency that pays the same commission on a six-figure custom build and a one-month retainer will get a pipeline that does not match its capacity. Odoo's commission plans let you set different rates per service product, per practice, and per margin band, a new-logo...
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The whole stack pays off in one place: a project profitability dashboard that shows, per project, revenue invoiced, cost incurred (timesheets at internal cost rate, subcontractor invoices, expenses), margin in dollars and percent, and forecast to completion. Project managers see their own projects; partners see the...
Bonus
The features matter; the partner shipping them matters more. Eight checks separate the partners who deliver from the ones who learn on your budget:
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