Use case — Project-driven work
Whether a project was profitable, you only find out after delivery.
The quote is in Word, the hours in an app, purchasing in email and the post-calculation in Excel. For construction, installation and project companies, that means managing by gut feeling, and only finding out afterwards what a project really cost.
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Sound familiar?
The problem we encounter
Every project its own spreadsheet
Budgets, additional work and planning live in separate Excel files per project. Only the project manager knows which version is current — and sometimes not even they do.
Hours and purchasing come in too late
Timesheets are processed at the end of the week (or month), purchase invoices keep trickling in for weeks. As a result, project costs are always an outdated picture.
Extra work evaporates
Extra work is agreed on site, but not always recorded — and therefore not always invoiced. Margin leaks away without anyone noticing.
Post-calculation as a surprise
Only months after delivery, once all invoices are in, does it become clear whether the project made any money. By then, it is far too late to adjust course.
The analysis
What is really going on
Quote, planning, hours, purchasing and invoicing are in reality one continuous process per project. But as soon as each part lives in a different system, there is no single place where the complete project picture exists. The coherence sits in the heads of project managers and in spreadsheets that are by definition out of date.
The result: the question “how is this project doing?” costs half a day of digging — and is therefore asked too rarely. Not because nobody wants to know, but because the answer is too expensive.
The approach
Our solution in Odoo
In Odoo, the quote automatically becomes a project with tasks, budget and planning once approved. Employees log hours on the task they are working on — via phone or tablet, right there on site. Purchase orders and invoices are attached to the same project, so every euro and every hour lands in the right place.
You record additional work as an extra order line and simply invoice it along with the rest. This fundamentally changes the daily way of working: not reconstructing afterwards what happened, but seeing what is going on before and during the project.
What we use for this
- Odoo Sales: from quote to project automatically
- Odoo Project & Planning for tasks, phases and capacity
- Odoo Timesheets, linked directly to tasks
- Odoo Purchase & Accounting, with costs per project
- Invoicing based on progress, instalments or actual costs
What it delivers
The result
One up-to-date picture per project: budgeted versus actual, hours, purchasing, additional work and invoicing. The project manager sees during the project where things are getting stuck and can adjust course before the margin evaporates. Management sees across all projects which are on track and which need attention.
And the post-calculation? That is no longer a project in itself, but the push of a button — because all the data is already in the right place.
From real projects
Isolatie.com Groep: grip on costs and progress per project
Isolatie.com Groep works project-based in construction and installation. With Odoo, the company has insight into costs and progress per project — without separate spreadsheets on the side.
Read the Isolatie.com Groep customer case →Want to know how your project is doing while it is still running?
Start the Business Scan and discover where you are losing grip — or contact us directly.
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