° Media company, Germany

The starting point

Quotes were calculated in Excel, and invoices were written by hand in Word and sent as PDFs. Nobody could see at a glance what had already been delivered, invoiced and paid in a project, so some projects were not paid in full because the project manager lacked an overview of what was still open. Capacity and cash flow planning were difficult: it was unclear how much would come in each quarter and where the money was going. The customer contacts were kept in a separate CRM.

What we changed

Sales

We moved the CRM over from the previous platform into Odoo and imported a large dataset of potential customers with their size and key figures. A pipeline filters prospects by size, since a small organisation has a different budget from a large one, and every week the sales team gets its prospects assigned for phone prospecting. The VoIP phone system is connected to Odoo: one click on a number starts the call. We defined the sales process with the team, from cold to warm lead, with follow-ups and every call note kept on the contact.

Contact research with AI

For many prospects the right contact person was still missing. We built an AI workflow for it: for each prospect it searches the web with terms the sales team chooses and takes the most relevant hits. A language model reads those pages and extracts the matching contacts, and a second model rates them by relevance. The results land in Odoo as contacts of the prospect, marked as AI-generated, and a person reviews them before sales uses them.

Projects and invoicing

Every project task shows what was sold, delivered and invoiced. The quarterly invoice picks up the open deliveries itself and charges only what has not been invoiced yet. It is generated in Odoo in the same PDF layout as before and goes out as an e-invoice in ZUGFeRD or XRechnung format, activated per customer.

Planning

Project managers plan per quarter what will be delivered and see planned, delivered and invoiced side by side, in percent or in euros. The plan is frozen before it is reconciled, so at the end of the quarter the system shows how accurate the planning was.

Switch to Community

After a year on Enterprise we migrated the company to Odoo Community in ten phases and rebuilt every customisation that lived in Enterprise's visual editor as versioned code.