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Odoo capability guide — Project & Timesheets

Logged hours that become an invoice, not a spreadsheet someone re-types.

Odoo Project and Timesheets share one database, so a task, the hours logged against it, and the invoice line that hour eventually becomes are all the same record viewed three ways. That’s the pitch. The gap is usually approvals, budgets, and the fact that your team lives in Slack, not the Odoo task chatter. Here’s what ships out of the box, and what we build to close that gap.

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What Odoo Project & Timesheets does out of the box

Six things it gets right — before you customise a line of code.

Odoo Project isn’t a to-do list with a fresh coat of paint. It’s a proper project database that Timesheets, Sales, and Accounting all read from directly — which is what makes the billing story work at all.

Kanban, list & Gantt views

The same task set renders as a drag-and-drop kanban board, a filterable list, or a Gantt timeline with dependency arrows — switch views per project, per person, without re-entering data. Milestones show up as diamond markers on the Gantt automatically once you set them.

Timesheets tied to tasks

Every timesheet line is logged against a specific task, which belongs to a specific project, which belongs to a specific customer. That chain is what lets Odoo answer “how many hours has this client actually cost us this quarter” without a pivot table.

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Billable vs non-billable

Each task or project carries an invoicing policy — time and materials, fixed price, or non-billable — and each timesheet line inherits it. Internal admin, training, and bench time stay out of client invoices without anyone manually flagging rows.

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Timesheets → invoice lines

On a time-and-materials project, unbilled timesheet hours show up as a queue Odoo can turn into a draft invoice in one click — one line per employee or per task, at that employee’s costing rate or a project-level sell rate. No re-keying hours into a separate billing tool.

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Resource planning & capacity

The Planning app (or Project’s own workload view) shows who’s allocated to what, week by week, against their working calendar — so overbooking a senior engineer across three client projects is visible before it happens, not after the deadline slips.

Project templates

Mark a project as a template and duplicating it clones the full task structure, stages, and default assignees. Useful the moment you run the same kind of engagement (an onboarding, an audit, a fixed-scope build) more than twice.

Where the standard setup breaks down

Logging hours is easy. Trusting them isn’t.

Native Odoo Project handles the single-project, single-timezone, everyone-logs-in-daily case cleanly. Once there’s a client who wants visibility, a finance team that wants a budget cap, or a team that reports status in Slack instead of the chatter, the gaps show up fast.

Native Odoo, as shipped

  • Any user can log a timesheet line — no approval step before it’s billable
  • No native budget field that stops a project at, say, 80% of contracted hours and flags it
  • Task status changes don’t reach Slack, WhatsApp, or a client’s inbox — someone has to check Odoo
  • Clients see nothing unless you give them a portal login and walk them through it
  • Gantt view is generic — no site-phase or trade-sequencing logic for construction-style scheduling

With Entrophy’s tooling on top

  • Manager approval workflow before timesheet lines become billable — submit, approve, then invoice
  • Budget tracking against contracted hours or fixed fee, with automatic alerts as a project approaches its cap
  • Slack/email notifications on task moves, overdue items, and milestone completion — two-way where it’s worth it
  • Branded client portal showing task progress, hours consumed, and upcoming milestones — no Odoo login required
  • Custom Gantt logic for construction and agency use — phase dependencies, resource conflicts, critical-path highlighting

Approval workflows and budget guardrails are the two gaps we get asked to fill most — they’re small builds with an outsized effect on whether finance actually trusts the numbers.

What we typically customise

The layer that turns tracked into billed, on time.

Client portal with live project & hours status Automated billing rules by milestone or SLA Custom Gantt views for construction phasing Agency-style retainer & capped-hours billing Timesheet approval chains by manager or client Budget-vs-actual alerts per project Slack / email status sync Overtime & shift-differential billing rates Multi-currency project billing Resource capacity dashboards across teams
1 clickfrom unbilled timesheet queue to draft invoice, native
3 viewskanban, list & Gantt over the same task data
0native approval gate before a timesheet line becomes billable
2apps we’ve published live on apps.odoo.com

Not sure your billable hours are actually being billed?

We’ll look at your project setup, invoicing policies, and timesheet-to-invoice flow, and tell you plainly where hours are leaking — and what it’d take to close it.