Duration: 25:27
PART 1 — Analytical Summary 🚀
Context 💼
This session, led by Jérôme Vandam (Business Analyst and Accounting Expert at Odoo), unveils a new Fiscal Deadlines Dashboard designed to help entrepreneurs and accountants manage tax obligations with confidence. The goal: turn Odoo Accounting’s rich data and automation into a guided, collaborative workflow that reduces errors and accelerates compliance. It matters because tax compliance is time-sensitive and error-prone, especially across diverse localizations and evolving regulations.
What’s being announced 🧠
Odoo introduces a centralized, guided dashboard for tracking and executing tax obligations based on your company’s localization and installed features. Beyond handling invoices, payments, bank reconciliation, and declarations, Odoo now provides a structured assistant that orchestrates tax work in a maximum of three steps—Review, Submit, Pay—with built-in controls and collaboration.
The dashboard automatically displays relevant deadlines (e.g., VAT, advance tax payments, corporate income tax, client listings, and more), and expands dynamically when you activate features like OSS for distance sales. It embeds automatic and manual controls that guide users to the exact records requiring attention and enables seamless teamwork via Chatter and the Documents app.
How it works: the Review → Submit → Pay flow ⚙️
The heart of the innovation is a simple funnel:
- Review: Automated and manual controls highlight issues (e.g., pending bank reconciliation affecting VAT, missing supplier bill attachments, draft invoices). Each control links to the precise screen to fix it. Odoo also offers coherence checks (e.g., tax-country consistency) and provides a journal-specific document workspace to store supporting files.
- Submit: Once controls pass, Odoo proposes the country-specific submission path (e.g., generating the Belgian XML file with guidance for Intervat). The declaration remains dynamic—users can drill into the underlying entries at any time.
- Pay: Odoo relates the deadline to a defined payment partner, generates a QR code to simplify payment, or lets you assign and notify a stakeholder (e.g., a CFO) via Chatter, with traceability preserved inside the deadline record.
On validation, Odoo posts a centralization/closing entry, applies a tax period lock automatically, and foregrounds the declaration with a clear visual cue (e.g., the purple VAT button).
Demo highlights (Belgium localization) 💬
The walkthrough shows VAT closing with controls for bank fees reconciliation, missing attachments on a vendor bill, and draft sales invoices. Fixes are one click away, thanks to tight links to bank statements, the purchase journal, and document storage. After validation, Odoo shows the generated centralization entry and confirms the tax lock through the accounting closing dates screen. Submission produces the Belgian XML and guidance for Intervat, while payment is handled through a QR code or delegated via Chatter. Once complete, the VAT deadline is cleared from the dashboard.
Beyond VAT, the dashboard includes corporate income tax deadlines with tailored controls (e.g., ensuring partners are set on entries that require them), plus flexible status handling (reviewed/supervised) depending on user rights.
Customization and extensibility 🧠
A key strength is extensibility. You can: - Create new deadlines with custom periodicity, due offsets, and steps (e.g., an internal “Sales Closing” deadline due three days after month-end, limited to the Review step). - Attach actionable controls that open specific reports or views (e.g., an “Orders to invoice” list, or a direct link to the Audit Journal for VAT vs. revenue reconciliation). - Add descriptions to standardize how teams execute reviews and, if needed, bind controls to specific models for further automation.
When features like OSS are enabled, related fiscal deadlines appear automatically—showcasing an integrated, feature-driven compliance approach.
Localization, compliance, and roadmap ⚙️
The tool is built to respect localization: many controls are standard across countries, while others are country-specific. Odoo will keep localization packages updated as regulations evolve. In Q&A, the team noted ongoing efforts around French requirements (e.g., transmission of the liasse fiscale from Odoo, and PDP certification for e-invoicing under the French Finance Law—certification in progress). Users can also choose the start date from which Odoo generates deadlines, ensuring smooth adoption mid-year without cluttering the past.
Impact & takeaways 💡
This Fiscal Deadlines Dashboard upgrades Odoo from an already capable accounting engine to a proactive compliance assistant. The impact is threefold: - Reduced risk and rework: automatic controls surface anomalies early, with deep links to fix them; tax periods lock automatically; reports remain dynamic for drilldown. - Faster execution: a consistent Review–Submit–Pay flow, with localized file generation and QR-based payment, helps teams close faster. - Stronger collaboration: Chatter and Documents are embedded at every step, enabling accountants and entrepreneurs to communicate, share evidence, and track decisions in context.
In short, Odoo turns tax compliance into a guided, collaborative, and auditable process—on one screen, across localizations, and extensible to company-specific checks and internal deadlines.
Notable Q&A insights: - Upgrades apply to the whole database, not a single module (e.g., from v18 to v19). - Multi-currency reconciliations proceed through the standard bank reconciliation view. - A cross-client “fiduciary dashboard” exists (covered in a separate talk) to monitor multiple customers. - VAT on cash basis is respected: amounts aren’t included until payment is received. - French PDP certification is underway; liasse fiscale transmission is already supported from Odoo.
PART 2 — Viewpoint: Odoo Perspective
Disclaimer: AI-generated creative perspective inspired by Odoo’s vision.
The promise of integrated software is not just to store data but to make decisions clearer and work simpler. With this dashboard, we bridge the gap between accounting records and real-world obligations, guiding users from insight to action in three intuitive steps.
What excites me most is how it unifies community-driven localizations with a consistent, friendly UX. Less configuration, more outcomes. Accountants and entrepreneurs can finally collaborate in context—documents, controls, submissions, and payments all in one flow. That’s the essence of Odoo: powerful integration made accessible.
PART 3 — Viewpoint: Competitors (SAP / Microsoft / Others)
Disclaimer: AI-generated fictional commentary. Not an official corporate statement.
Odoo’s compliance workflow is thoughtfully designed, especially the Review–Submit–Pay construct and embedded collaboration. The localization-aware controls and payment QR codes deliver tangible UX value for SMEs. The ability to add custom controls and deadlines is a practical way to reflect each company’s compliance playbook.
The challenge, as deployments scale, will be depth and breadth: sustaining frequent regulatory updates across jurisdictions, ensuring robust audit trails and segregation-of-duties, and managing multi-entity, multi-GAAP consolidations. For larger enterprises with stringent internal controls, integration with broader governance frameworks and e-invoicing networks (e.g., formal PDP status in France) will be critical. Still, the user experience and speed of iteration set a high bar for the market.
PART 4 — Blog Footer Disclaimer
Disclaimer: This article contains AI-generated summaries and fictionalized commentaries for illustrative purposes. Viewpoints labeled as "Odoo Perspective" or "Competitors" are simulated and do not represent any real statements or positions. All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.