Over the Christmas/New Year break, we took our own advice to heart and migrated to odoo for our own consulting business.

Over the last few months as we've been building out our odoo for Wine offering and roadmap, we have been looking at the approximately 80 apps/modules that come with standard odoo. We started to realize that several covered functionality that we were managing in several separate apps and systems, so asked ourselves, why aren't we running odoo ourselves? We didn't have a good reason as to why not, so we decided to do exactly that - migrate from several disparate systems to odoo and starting drinking our own champagne. A pleasant surprise, although perhaps it shouldn't have been, is that we're saving on annual subscriptions as well.

Here are the functions and systems we've moved off and are now running out of odoo.

• Waveapps: Accounting, Invoicing, Payments. Our main book-keeping system; had to manually enter invoice hours and expenses.

• Avaza : Projects, Timesheets and Expenses. We used this to record timesheets for our client projects and internal time including PTO. We also used it to track recurring and one-off expenses that were either tied to projects or which reimbursement was needed. We didn't invoice out of Avaza but we used its invoicing functionality to keep track of what times and expenses were invoiced or needed invoicing. 

• Website:  Hosted with Dreamhost and written in WordPress; we had originally paid someone to develop the website but were maintaining the updates internally

• Agile CRM: Tracked our leads here but had to go into Avaza and Waveapps when they converted to projects and sales. 

Apart from having the one login and system to manage all of the above, here are the benefits we saw:

• Cost: we are expecting a 59% reduction in subscription fees year 1, and 43% reduction each year after that (more in year 1 due to a first year discount).

• Timesheets and expenses are now directly tied to Sales Orders and Invoices; no re-entering hours or expenses from one system to another.

• Enquiries on our website now automatically generate leads in odoo CRM, which can then convert to a Sales Order if and when it gets that far.

• We are now active users of odoo running our own business, so we're seeing and learning first hand what works, how to resolve problems, and how to optimize odoo, so we should be able to better support our winery and other users.

• A bonus was the migration from all the above systems onto odoo took about 2 or 3 days; over the weeks since then we've certainly finetuned some processes, tweaked reports and forms, etc. (all of which, by the way, is pretty simple in odoo) but we were up & running in a few days.

We aren't quite finished; there are a few more modules & functionality we're looking to add over the coming weeks and months. Another bonus with odoo is you pay one fee and get access to everything; we can scale and add more apps when our business needs it or we have the bandwidth to do it.

• Help Desk: we had previously used Zoho but we didn't find it a great fit so had stopped using it recently while we looked for something new; odoo has a Help Desk app so we'll be using that. 

• Customer Portal: when we enable this, customers will be able to click directly on invoices to view timesheets tied to an invoice, ask questions online about an invoice, etc.

• Payroll: this one's a bit further off; this is a relatively new offering from odoo and, to be honest, still lacks a bit of integration with the tax authorities that we're willing to pay to have done for us at present. When they cover this we'll seriously look at incorporating payroll as well.

Now, to be fully transparent, we're a consulting company and not a winery, so we've implemented "standard" odoo, not our odoo for Wine extension. Our business model and processes are a lot simpler than a winery of course, but we are now drinking our own champagne and reaping the benefits.

If you're a winery (or brewery or cidery for that matter) and would like a demo or to discuss odoo for Wine, or even a consulting company like us, and would like to learn more about odoo in general, click here.