Dear community,
I just received an email with a very thoughtful question: "What can I expect from the OCA? How can I promote to my customers the OCA work compared with the current Proprietary Apps offer? What would the sales pitch look like?"
While writing him back, I though I might better write a blog post about it! So here it is. This is a non-exaustive list of what I know about the OCA contributions. It does not pretend to be complete. It just reflect my vision of our current work achieved so far and what are the the main advantages to work with OCA Apps.
I just received an email with a very thoughtful question: "What can I expect from the OCA? How can I promote to my customers the OCA work compared with the current Proprietary Apps offer? What would the sales pitch look like?"
While writing him back, I though I might better write a blog post about it! So here it is. This is a non-exaustive list of what I know about the OCA contributions. It does not pretend to be complete. It just reflect my vision of our current work achieved so far and what are the the main advantages to work with OCA Apps.
How do you benefit from using OCA Apps?
As all the OCA work is released under an OSI approved license, and currently 99% of it is APGL v3.0, you can access the source code, propose improvements and collaborate with hundreds of Odooers around the world. That mostly means to me:
For integrators: Using OCA apps ensures that you can deliver a professionnal service to your customer. You have access to all the code base and can ensure a global support that cover the whole solution. As they are open source, you can freely evaluate what best suit your customer needs, no hidden bad surprise.
For customers: Using OCA apps ensures you to benefit from a strong community. It will provide as much warranty as possible that your apps will be reliable and maintained over time. You won't be left alone with a module that will be dropped because of bad revenue. You will share the maintenance costs with all other users and benefit from all improvements for free. Most importantly, you are not locked in in any way!
Bank & Reconciliation
The contributors have made a remarkable job in this area. Allowing to import statement from lots of bank formats, providing automatic reconciliation tools. Very useful for e-commerce company, but not only!
Connectors
Lots of open source connectors have been developed and overall, a base framework that allows any company or developer to connect Odoo to virtually anything:
Tools and magic
You're looking for magic apps that will rock your day-to-day work with Odoo ? Let's have a look in here, you will find:
- Edit and update hundreds of records at once
- Integrate Odoo with single-sign-on (SSO)
- Manage various environments (test, production, integration, QA)
- Make prototyping and generate a module from it
- Import data from external sources
- And more!
Consolidation & Operation Unit
Account consolidation in multi-company and multi-currency context with those two modules. Handle also Operating Unit that divides a company from a Business/Divisional axis, while Departments divide a company from a functional axis perspective:
Financial Reports
Always wanted to benefits from professionnal financial reports and statements? Have a look at our work:
Return of Merchandise
A whole set of modules to manage the RMA operations, product returns, warranty control, refunds and more:
Invoicing
Bring invoicing to a new level by using module in this repository:
- Merge invoices
- Group lines of invoices
- Use the power of pricelists in invoices
- Use invoice templates
Taxes and VAT
Manage very complex tax and VAT rules with those modules, allowing you to even manage the Brazilian tax system (one of the most complex in the world):
Stock and Logistics
There is so much useful Apps in those repositories, I don't even know where to start!
- Manage stock reservation management
- Create order points for hundreds of product easily
- Group deliveries and picking based on your custom criteria
- Compute your delivery dates from incoming product last planned dates of arrival
- Split picking and deliveries
- Handle consignment and transport planning
- Bar code printing and scanning
- And more...
Financial Tools
A set of tools to ease accountant's job and increase the functional scope in the finance area, making Odoo suitable for big businesses. In here you will find:
- account_asset_management to deal with advanced asset process
- account_credit_control to manage your customer reminder in a very advanced manners
- currency_rate_update to easily and automatically update rates of currencies
- account_move_locking to lock entries, so financial controllers can do their job (used in most large companies)
- Tons of little modules that eases the life of an accountant
Sales
Lots of Apps will help you deal with specific use cases within the sale process. Among them:
- Provide cancellation reasons on sales order
- Manage sales exceptions management (no stock at date, margin is too low, develop your own ones)
- Rent products through sale order
- Sale and deliver products from stock of various owner (logistic sub-contractor)
- Manage set in sales order, adding various product at once easily
- And more..
Purchases
Having a good purchase process is nowadays a must for all companies, you will find here apps that will bring your procurement operations to a new level:
- Manage Framework agreement with your supplier
- Automatically order to the supplier with best price condition
- Make professional calls for bids and tenders
- Comparative bid analysis
- Handle vendor consignment stock
- Record discount per supplier
- And many more....
Localizations
OpenUpgrade
The OCA supports a project to help people migrate their Odoo instance to newer versions. They are Open Source tools provided by our beloved community.
- Find the repository here
- Here is the documentation.
Carrier integration
In the following repository, you will find apps to integrate your logistic with carriers. It also provide a base layer to ease the development of your own one, but moreover it helps you deal with various carriers in an efficient way.
UI & Web addons
We have a repository where you will find great apps to improve the user experience:
- Markdown language support
- Enjoy tree view images
- Full width popup and screen
- Automatic colors for same values in tree view
- Export in one click to pdf/csv the current view
- Popup translations
- And many more....
Geospatial addons
Find here apps that will bring a new geospatial view in Odoo, allowing to display on a map records, statistics, symbols and more...
There is still a lot more to discover!
That was just a summary of our constantly evolving repository where you have hundreds of other Apps in various areas, like:
- Project management and services to manage SLA, service desk, etc..
- Human resources to manage contract, skills, experience, etc...
- A lot of verticalization for Odoo
- Manufacturing improvements coming from the great OdooMRP team
- Specific product attributes to support brand, electronic devices, serial numbers, etc..
- And many more....
