What I love most about Odoo Accounting is how tightly it connects our sales, rental equipment logs and books all in one place, no more bouncing between separate spreadsheets and our old accounting tool. Before we switched, every time we sent out a rental equipment quote to a fabrication shop, our accountant had to manually build an invoice later, and it was so easy to mismatch line items. I remember one messy incident back in March with a local vendor, Lone Star Metal Fabrication. We rented them two plasma cutting tables for a three-week job, our sales rep updated the rental order in our inventory sheet, but the invoice got created manually with the wrong rental expiration date. By the time we caught it, the customer had already paid for one week less than they owed, and we spent hours chasing that correction and smoothing things over with their office manager. That kind of mix-up barely happens now because Odoo auto-generates draft invoices straight from our confirmed sales and rental orders. I just double-check the details and approve it, which saves so much back-and-forth.
I also really rely on the bank reconciliation feature. We work with dozens of contractors, and payments come in through PayPal, ACH and credit cards all the time. The automatic bank sync pulls transactions in daily, and most of them match up to open invoices right away. A couple months ago, we had a maintenance company, Hillcrest Facility Services, send a bulk payment covering three separate equipment rental invoices. Back in our old system, I would’ve had to hunt each invoice down one by one and mark them paid manually. Inside Odoo, the matching tool grouped that lump payment against the three open lines automatically. It cut what used to be a 40-minute task down to just a few clicks.
The overdue invoice reminders are another huge win for our small team. We don’t have a dedicated collections person, so keeping up on slow-paying contractor accounts falls on me. I can set up the automated email reminders for net-30 terms, and it takes the awkward follow-up work off my plate. We had a recurring issue with a small welding shop that consistently forgot their invoices, and those gentle auto-notices helped us get payments in on time without me having to make repeated phone calls. Plus, the multi-currency and built-in reporting works great for our occasional out-of-state equipment orders. I can pull quick profit reports tied to specific vendor lines, so I can flag which equipment rentals are actually making us margin. It keeps our warehouse and sales team aligned with our financials, and I don’t have to export piles of CSV files just to put together our weekly operational report. It’s not perfect, but this integration alone has saved me multiple hours every single week and stopped a lot of those costly billing errors we used to run into constantly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What I dislike most about Odoo Accounting is that it can get clunky and overly rigid when we need to handle the messy, one-off scenarios that pop up all the time for our equipment rental and supply business. The automation works fantastic for standard orders, but anything outside the normal workflow quickly becomes a headache, and I’ve run into some frustrating, time-consuming mistakes because of it. Back in April, we had a rush order for Tri-City Maintenance, a regular client that needed replacement air compressor parts alongside a short-term generator rental. The generator got delayed by our equipment supplier, Texas Power Rentals, so we agreed to credit them one day of rental fees. I tried to add that line-item credit directly to the existing invoice in Odoo Accounting, but the auto-reconciliation logic kept breaking. It kept trying to match the full original invoice amount against their incoming payment, ignoring the credit adjustment. I spent over an hour digging through journal entries, and for a minute, it looked like our books showed an unpaid balance that didn’t actually exist. We had to send a separate credit note outside the main order flow, which confused our sales rep and the customer’s bookkeeper.
I also find the batch payment error reporting really vague. Last month, we received a combined ACH payment from four different contractor accounts, including Westside Fabrication. One of the invoice numbers attached to their transfer had a typo, and the whole batch failed to process. Odoo just threw a generic error message saying the batch didn’t reconcile. It didn’t tell me which specific line or invoice was causing the problem. I had to go through every single payment line manually to track down that typo. With our small team, that’s time I should be spending on scheduling deliveries or checking equipment inspection statuses, not hunting for tiny data entry mistakes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
