3-step plan for Administrative Offices

More and more administrative and accounting firms are looking for ways to automate their processes and work more efficiently. An integrated platform like Odoo can mean a huge step forward in this. But how do you ensure that you make client administrations available to your employees and clients in a structured way?

With the 3-step plan from dooIT, you can start in a controlled manner, gain experience, and ultimately have all your clients efficiently managed in Odoo by your office team.

Step 1: Start with 2 client administrations (gain experience)

By starting with a limited number of administrations with part of your team, you gain experience with all the possibilities of Odoo and are fully prepared for step 2 (building a model administration). You know how to manage bookkeeping, but we want you to experience how to do it most efficiently in Odoo together with your client. Preferably with two (or more depending on the size of your team) client administrations that can be booked daily/weekly. => There are offices that want to start with their own administration, but your office often has many more needs besides bookkeeping, hence our advice to start with client administrations. 

Together, we set up a client administration, which we then duplicate and rename. By working with these administrations for a month to a (VAT) quarter, you will discover, among other things:

• How to collaborate optimally with your client through tasks in chatter
• How the follow-up of tasks proceeds
• • How and where your office receives the purchase invoices and which steps the client may take and which your office should handle (and with which task to maintain overview and insight) and what the optimal settings of the purchase journal are. 
  • How easily sales invoices are created and whether you want to make this available to clients (or have clients email sales invoices to the journal in their Odoo client administration).  
  • How to create an activity for your client in the bank for an invoice/receipt that is yet to be received 
  • and more...
• Have you experienced the possibilities of multi-company in combination with account schemes, do you know the benefits of the Odoo archiving function? 
• Whether the Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss report align with your office's way of advising clients
• Dashboard functions - are there reports with which your office can make a difference? 
• Learn how Odoo handles the 99999 account and the calculation of P&L on the Balance. 
• Which settings are useful for your office and your client
• • which rights and roles exist, and which are useful for each type of client. 

This step is therefore crucial. You get to know Odoo and discover how your client administration process fits best in Odoo.

Step 2: Build a model database

When your team has gained enough experience, it is time to set up a model database (in the meantime, you know why an Odoo administration is called a database ;-). A model database serves as a blueprint for all your future administrations. Here you set everything up as optimally as possible, for example:

• Standard chart of accounts (RGS?)
• VAT codes and settings
• Journals (favorite, the others archived)
• Link your PKI government service certificate for automatic filing of VAT and ICP via Digipoort. 
• Reports with correct categories
• Do you link your scan and recognition bundle (so that it automatically runs through all your client databases)
• Standard and your specific office tasks and workflows 

By setting these things up properly once, you prevent having to reconfigure everything for each new client or having to create an additional account across all databases after a certain number of client administrations.

The result is a standardized foundation that you can easily duplicate for a new client, ensuring speed, consistency, and fewer errors.

Step 3: Duplicate and create clients

When your model database is ready, you can use it to create new client administrations at lightning speed.

The process then becomes simple:

1. Duplicate the model administration
2. Create the new client
3. Only adjust client-specific data

Since the foundation is already in place, you can scale up much faster. This makes it possible to efficiently transfer large numbers of clients to Odoo. If you have more than 100 administrations, we can potentially help you with a script that automatically creates all client administrations based on a list of client names according to your model. 

The next step: your own office in Odoo

When you have multiple clients successfully running in Odoo, the next step often naturally arises: managing your own office administration in Odoo as well.

This allows you to work entirely in one system for:

• accounting
• Overview per client of what still needs to be done 
• time registration and project management & invoicing
• document management including digital signing of orders, documents (WTFF)
• Tasks for clients to provide data 
• Website and much more.. 

This provides more overview, better collaboration within your team, and a much more efficient way of working.

Conclusion

Going live with client administrations in Odoo becomes clear and straightforward with the 3-step plan from dooIT. 

1. Start with a few administrations and get to know the system well
2. Build a correct model database
3. Duplicate and scale up to all your clients

With this approach, you lay a solid foundation for a future-proof accounting firm.

At dooIT, we specialize in administration and accountancy firms. This enables us to understand exactly which processes are important: from bookkeeping and scan & recognize to workflow management, reporting, and efficient client follow-up. We focus not only on the software but especially on how your firm can work smarter and more efficiently.

Together we ensure that:

• your client administrations go live in Odoo in a structured manner
• a strong model database is set up
• new clients can be added quickly and efficiently
• your office is ready for further growth and automation

Do you want to discover how Odoo can help your accounting office to work more efficiently and scale better? The dooIT team is happy to think along with you and guides you step by step in the implementation.