Every month the same ritual: payroll delivers a journal entry, someone opens Excel and posts the lines in the accounts by hand. Half an hour of work if it goes well, an afternoon if a cost centre has been added that does not exist yet.
If you use Nmbrs for payroll and Odoo for accounting, that can be automated.
What the integration does
The integration retrieves the payroll journal entries from Nmbrs and posts them in Odoo. More important than the retrieval itself is what happens along the way:
- General ledger mapping — the accounts Nmbrs uses are translated to your chart of accounts in Odoo. Set it up once, and it is right every month after that.
- Cost centres — the cost centre from payroll comes along, so staff costs per department or location remain visible.
- Cost units — the same for the dimension you want to allocate costs to.
- Analytic distributions — so that payroll costs in Odoo land on the analytic accounts you also post your projects and departments to.
That last one is the crux for project organisations. Payroll costs that are not analytically distributed are payroll costs you can never set against a project. Your margin per project is then an estimate.
What it means in practice
Instead of a monthly manual entry you get a journal entry ready to check and approve. You review it, see whether the totals match what Nmbrs says, and post it. From half an hour of retyping to five minutes of checking.
What to watch out for
- Do the mapping properly once. This is not a "just switch it on" job. The first month takes time: every account, cost centre and cost unit needs a counterpart. After that it is maintenance.
- New cost centres. If a location or department is added, it has to exist on both sides. Agree who flags that.
- Checking remains necessary. An automatic entry is not the same as a checked entry. Have someone keep comparing the totals with the payroll statement.
- Privacy. A journal entry contains no individual salaries if you post it at total level — and you usually want to keep it that way. Look critically at who in Odoo can access these entries.
What it costs
At the time of writing, €19.99 per month in the Connecta marketplace. For an action you perform every month, that usually pays for itself within a month.
View the Nmbrs integration or read how we Setting up Odoo for Dutch practice.