FOOD AND BEVERAGE WHOLESAL​E: 

Stock, invoices and books in one system for  a two-warehouse distributor.

​
A Foods Distribution moved from WinBooks, a stand-alone invoicing tool and

Excel stock lists to Odoo on 1 January 2025 — a year before Peppol became mandatory in Belgium.

The starting point:

Orders were taken in an invoicing tool that knew nothing about stock, then re-keyed into WinBooks as journal entries every week. Stock lived in two Excel files, one per warehouse, reconciled with a physical count once a quarter. Margins per product were only known after the quarterly count, and the finance team spent the first eight working days of each month reconciling the invoicing tool, WinBooks and the bank.
Imports from the Netherlands and France meant Intrastat declarations, and a quarter of the retail customers had already asked to receive invoices over Peppol.

What they needed:

• Real-time stock value per warehouse, with lot and expiry tracking for perishable products.
• Sales, deliveries, invoices and the general ledger in one system, so a delivery creates the invoice and the invoice creates the entry.
  
• Peppol for customers who asked for it, ahead of the January 2026 mandate.
• ​ Open customer and supplier invoices carried over individually, so January payments could be matched against December invoices.
  
  

What we built in Odoo

Chart and taxes: Belgian PCMN chart from the localisation; 31 WinBooks VAT codes consolidated into 18 Odoo taxes, each tested against its VAT grid. Fiscal positions for intra-EU customers, export and horeca.
Sales to invoice: Invoicing policy on delivered quantities, so partial deliveries invoice correctly. Price lists per customer segment (retail, horeca, cash-and-carry).
Purchase control: Three-way match: supplier bills checked against received quantities before they can be paid. Vendor bills from Peppol land directly in the purchase journal.
Inventory: Two warehouses with their own routes; lots with expiry dates on 2,300 products; FEFO removal strategy; perpetual (automated) valuation at average cost, posting stock moves to accounts 34 and 604.
Intrastat: Commodity codes and origin on product categories; monthly Intrastat report generated from purchase receipts.
Bank: Six bank accounts on CodaBox, one journal per IBAN. Reconciliation models for card-terminal payouts and bank charges, so recurring lines reconcile without manual work.
Receivables: Three payment follow-up levels with automatic reminder emails; SEPA direct debit mandates for 140 horeca customers.
E-invoicing: Company registered on Peppol (EAS 0208, enterprise number); customers checked for Peppol participation and set to BIS Billing 3.0.
Fiscal: Disallowed expenses configured by fiscal category (restaurant costs at 69% deductible, vehicle costs per car).

What made the difference. Loading the opening stock by lot from the 31 December count, not from the Excel files. It meant the first January delivery already respected expiry dates, and stock value matched the ledger from day one.