MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCY:
From timesheets in spreadsheets to revenue recognised per project:
An Advisory brought three years of WinBooks history into Odoo so that the partners could compare every project and service line year on year in one place.
The starting point
Consultants logged hours in a shared spreadsheet. At month-end an office manager turned those hours into invoices by hand, then the external accountant booked them in WinBooks. Nobody could see profitability per project until the accountant produced quarterly figures, and expense claims arrived as paper receipts
in an envelope.
Freelance subcontractors made up a fifth of delivery capacity, which meant 281.50 fee forms every year, prepared in Excel from WinBooks extracts.
What they needed
- Hours logged once, against a project, and invoiced from there — on time and materials or on milestones.
- Profitability per project, per service line and per partner, with three years of history for comparison.
- Paperless expenses and supplier bills.
- Payroll entries from the social secretariat booked automatically.
What we built in Odoo
Projects and time: 85 active projects, each linked to a sales order line. Timesheets entered daily in Odoo, approved weekly by the project lead.
Invoicing: Two invoicing policies: time and materials on approved timesheets, and fixed-fee milestones validated by the partner. Invoices sent over Peppol to clients registered there, by email otherwise.
Analytics: Two analytic plans, service line (Strategy, Finance, Transformation) and partner, distributed automatically from the project. Annual budgets per service line.
Expenses: Receipts photographed in the mobile app, approved by managers, reimbursed by SEPA batch twice a month.
Documents: Supplier bills emailed to a dedicated alias, digitised by OCR into draft bills, routed for approval before posting.
Payroll: SODA files from the social secretariat fetched daily through CodaBox, with
social-secretariat accounts mapped to the Odoo chart.
Fiscal: 281.50 tags on 22 freelance suppliers and their fee accounts; form 325 generated from Odoo. Disallowed expenses by fiscal category.
Bank: Two IBANs on CodaBox; reconciliation models for payroll transfers and card fees.
Where they are now
- Hours become invoices. Approved timesheets feed the invoice run; nothing is retyped.
- Profitability per project, live. Revenue, time cost and expenses per project and service line, compared with the two previous years.
- No paper. Receipts and supplier bills are digitised on arrival and approved in Odoo.
- Fee forms from the system. 281.50 and 325 come straight from tagged suppliers and accounts.
