With the evolution of digital technology in our lives, our business process is obviously evolving too. Going paperless, sending emails every minute,... today we are executing more tasks and faster than 20 years ago! 

Nowadays, an integrated business management software is essential to follow the stream and to be part of the competition. I remember one of our clients saying that they couldn’t face the concurrence because of their lack of a good management system. Their business process was slowing down their production compared to their competitors.

That's why today, we here at Odoo are proud to release a mature management system that can, again, save you more time! Our R&D team has worked hard on all the details that, in the end, make a huge difference. Whether it’s about features, execution speed or usability, we can now say that Odoo 12 reaches perfection! 

Let me introduce you some of the major changes of Odoo 12. You can find the details of Odoo 12 on the Release Notes page. 

New dashboards for a better understanding of the data. 

Get to know the sales or financial health of your company right away! Thanks to a new data layout, you have directly a view of the latest KPIs when opening the application.

This dashboard works like a custom report where you can compare data from different periods and see the evolution of your business. For example, in the Inventory app, your dashboard gives you the average cycle times and delays with information about the value coming in and out of stock. In the CRM app, see at a glance the Win/Loss ratio of your opportunities and the media from which your leads came from.

Monitoring your business activities is now easy thanks to all the views including graph, pivot data and cohort view. 

Better barcodes, faster processes

In terms of inventory management, Odoo 12 has it all! 

Thanks to the new barcode app, workers can process their pickings much faster.

Moreover, the user interface (UI) has been updated and perfectly adapted for mobile use. It eases the scan of lots and serial numbers even when being stuck between warehouse shelves! Managing products in different warehouses is even easier than before with Odoo 12.

And that’s not it! Special attention has been brought to the Manufacturing process. Even with large gloves, work orders can be processed simply by using the barcode scanner. Small details like these make a difference for the production team by saving precious seconds at every step! 

Manage all your files thanks to our new application: Odoo Documents

Even if you go paperless, it doesn’t mean that others will follow suit (we’ve got another solution for them, see the Accounting section of the blog). Some businesses may continue sending their invoices through the mail forcing their clients to archive these, which takes space, or obliges you to scan and classify them on an external server (hello specific access, bye-bye precious extra time)! Well, you’re not out of the woods yet, except if you use Odoo Documents.

With Odoo Documents, you can easily share, send, categorize, archive scanned documents, and generate business documents like vendor bills, vendor refunds, tasks, electronically sign. (more to come in the upcoming versions). Like any Odoo application, Odoo Documents is integrated with the system with the Sign, Project and Accounting applications! You can request a signature over a file through Odoo Sign, or you can automatically encode the contact details of a supplier from their invoice and save it in the system.

In terms of files, Odoo Documents manages PDFs, images, documents, videos and URLs.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, have a look yourself by watching the Odoo Documents video.

 

Easily showcase all of your products thanks to the new Product Configurator

The power of Odoo eCommerce’s native feature lands in the backend system, with many improvements! 

How? The website’s visitors configurator is integrated into the backend system, which eases the creation of an order and saves time! Get rid of the endless-lists of products with numerous combinations of variants and configure it from the sales order by picking the attributes you need!

When configuring products, you can easily exclude certain combinations of values (e.g. the bike doesn’t exist in size XL in black color.)

The Product Configurator itself has been improved too! You can upsell endlessly thanks to the available options suggested in the cart. Once an option is chosen, you can link another product and it is automatically added in the list of the available options. For example, if you choose the Kid’s seat from the Available Options, you can have the kids protection gear show up in the options list. 

Moreover, custom values can be set, as well as the variant generated on-demand to manage fully custom products with tons of attributes.

Use multi-website to boost your revenues

What you’ve dreamed about for months is now a reality: a full-featured multi-website system in your favorite integrated management system. This opens up a wide range of possibilities,  diversification and customer segmentation for your business. A multiplied audience and boosted revenue are now just a few clicks away!

 

As of Odoo 12, each website can now work in a fully independent way, with its own branding, domain name, and content including headers, footers, pages, languages, products, blog posts, forums, and more.

Easy accounting like “A, B, C”

Nice new features have been developed in order to ease the business flow in accounting. 

We all know that accountants receive many paper invoices every week and need to scan them one by one in order to create one pdf file per invoice. Again, this is time-consuming. 

With Odoo Documents the flow is automated! Once the “Scan to email” button is pressed on your machine, you receive a single pdf file containing all the different invoices in the system. In a click, split the document per supplier. A great feature based on OCR (Optical Character Recognition) helps you to speed up the encoding of each information in the system.

 

It goes even further, the system memorizes what you did with a previous supplier invoice or purchase order and uses it to replicate the same actions for the upcoming documents coming from the same supplier. Again, a time-saving feature! 

Another noticeable change is the In-App Purchase feature to send your invoices and reminders. Once your invoice is ready to be sent, you have the option to send it by e-mail (the system does it for you), to print it or to send it by post mail for an extra cost! For the post mail feature, your invoice will be printed, put into an envelope, stamped and sent by a third-party supplier! No need to print and spend time on these administrative tasks! 

 

Other great features have been developed to ease the accountant’s job, such as Predict Vendor Bill accounts (the system will try to predict vendor bill accounts based on the history of previous bills) or the management payments compliance. 

Reports of your choice

Odoo Studio has some improvements of its own too! Thanks to the new report designer you can customize your reports in a few clicks, literally! Either you create a brand new report, or start from one of Odoo’s templates. The choice is yours!

 

Improving Performance and Robustness

Here’s the techie part! ;)

Our R&D team has worked on speed too! Odoo 12 is faster and response time has been reduced thanks to performance improvements for activities such as search queries with many filters, even on a very large dataset. 

Some details have been changed, which makes the system even more robust. The end-user can no longer accidentally delete important data, avoiding a breakdown of own database (e.g. categories for “next activities” are un-deletable).




These are just glimpses of all the incredible features Odoo 12 offers! Read our Release Notes page to know more about it!