Odoo for accountants: the updates worth knowing (and how to close your year)

Odoo keeps improving its accounting module at a fast pace, and some updates genuinely change an accountant's day-to-day. Here are the ones worth your attention, explained from a Swiss SME's point of view, followed by our method for a smooth annual closing.

Pay your bills straight from Odoo

No more exporting an XML file to upload to your e-banking. When your bank is connected to a payment initiation provider (such as Ponto), a Pay now button appears on the bill. You trigger the payment from Odoo, then confirm it on the bank side with your digipass. Fewer manual steps, fewer re-entry errors, and a cleaner audit trail between the invoice and the payment.

The "Journal Entries" smart button and splitting

A new Journal Entries smart button now appears directly on the invoice and gives a detailed view of the generated entries, with the option to show the fields you care about. Most importantly, it lets you split an entry.

• Split an account: break a line to allocate part of the amount to another account, handy when a single document covers several types of expense.
• Split a quantity: separate several items on the same invoice, for example to individualise fixed assets bought as a batch.

AI that lists your missing documents

Paired with the API, Odoo's AI can generate working files for you: for instance the list of unreconciled bank transactions, so you can chase a client for the missing supporting documents. It runs in the background while you keep working. This is the kind of automation that saves hours on repetitive month-end tasks.

Our method for a successful year-end closing

Closing the books is often dreaded. In Odoo it runs cleanly in four steps:

1. Check the fiscal year: in Accounting > Configuration > Settings, confirm the last day of your fiscal year.
2. Pull the balance sheet: via Reporting > Balance Sheet, for the right period.
3. Post the profit allocation: open a miscellaneous journal entry to allocate the year's result.
4. Lock the periods: in Accounting > Lock Dates, distinguish the lock that still allows exceptions from the irreversible, definitive lock.

Want to get the most out of Odoo on the finance side?

These features only pay off if your Odoo is properly configured for Swiss reality (chart of accounts, VAT, payroll). That's our job. We deploy and evolve your Odoo ERP, and we can run your accounting back-office directly on Odoo, with your data hosted in Switzerland. Book a free technology audit to talk it through.