The Barroux Abbey deploys Odoo version 8

The Barroux Abbey, a Catholic Abbey, home of fifty Benedictine monks, located near the Mont Ventoux (France), has rolled out Odoo version 8 in production on January 1st 2015 with Akretion. This deployment aims at replacing several home-made applications and a proprietary accounting and retail software by a single unified ERP software with a large functional scope. Odoo version 8 is now used by the monks in many areas of their activity:

• retail outlet: the monks run a retail shop - located next to the abbey - that sells their home-made products: olive oil (La Joïo, La Reïalo and La Siavo), wine (Ventoux Saint-Roman, Ventoux Saint-Alric, Ventoux Saint-Hilaire, Ventoux Saint-Louis), nougat, brioche, gingerbread, biscuits, bread, etc. This shop also sells products made by other abbeys, as well as religious articles, books and CDs. Odoo powers the two checkouts with bar code readers, receipt printers, credit card readers, checks printers and customer displays. It also handles the stock management with several warehouses and stock routes as well as the procurements.

• mail orders: the Abbey also sells a large part of their products via mail orders and online. Odoo records the orders, generates the picking waves, delivery documents and legal documents for the customs. Odoo is connected to the webservices of La Poste to automatically generate the colissimo labels for France, the French over-sea territories and the foreign countries.

• hospitality: the monks welcome male guests that wish to make a retreat. An Odoo module has been developed to record the stays of the guests, attribute their rooms and it also generates the list of the guests present for lunch and dinner.

• donations: generous donors support the Abbey and its missions by making donations. Several Odoo modules have been developed to manage simple and recurrent donations. These modules handle the record of simple donations via checks, credit card payment, online payment and wire transfers, but also the recurring donations via direct debit and credit transfers. Odoo also generates the tax receipts that are sent back to donors with the thank-you letter. The donations modules are fully integrated with the accounting and payment modules of Odoo.

• masses: anyone can offer a mass and ask for a special prayer intention. People can ask for a mass to be said on a special date (the anniversary of the death of a friend or relative, for instance); it can be a single mass or a novena or a gregorian mass. An Odoo module has been developed to record the mass requests and generate the daily planning of the various masses. This module is fully connected to the donation module so as to record the donation associated to each mass request.

• accounting: the Abbey now manages its accounting with Odoo not only for the commercial company that runs the hand-crafted production, the shop and mail order service, but also for the non-profit organization that runs the Abbey as well as other non-profit organizations that support the religious missions of the Abbey. Odoo centralises all the accounting movements of all these legal entities thanks to its support for multi-company configurations. Odoo is used to generate SEPA credit transfers, SEPA direct debits, French letters of change (LCR) and manages the deposit of checks. Odoo is also used to generate the French legal custom declarations (DEB).

The project will later be extended to connect Odoo to the new PrestaShop online shop that plans to be rolled out in the coming months.

Sharing is an important value for the monks; it is also at the heart of the free software movement. The Odoo modules that have been developed to manage stays and masses have been published under the AGPL licence on the Github project vertical-abbey, also named Philemon project, of the Odoo Community Association (OCA). The Odoo modules that manage donations have been published under the same licence on the Github project donation of the OCA. All these modules use the new-API of Odoo version 8 and have automated tests. They have been developed by two monks of the Abbey and by Alexis de Lattre from Akretion. These modules could be useful for other abbeys that would like to deploy Odoo to manage stays, donations and masses. The donation modules could also be useful for non-profit organizations and non-governmental organizations that require an ERP system that manages donations.

The OpenSource contributions made during this project at the Barroux Abbey also include several new modules that have been included in the OCA projects on Github (or are under review):

• the module account_banking_fr_lcr that adds support for French letters of change (LCR) now included in the French localization OCA project.

• the modules that add support for credit card readers, check printers and customer displays in the retail shop (hw_customer_display, hw_telium_payment_terminal, pos_customer_display and pos_payment_terminal) now included in the POS OCA project.

• the module base_location_geonames_import that automate the creation of the postal code database from the geonames.org database, now included in the partner-contact OCA project and its sister module  l10n_fr_base_location_geonames_import that is now part of the French localization OCA project.

• the module base_phone which includes several interesting features to validate phone numbers; which is part of the connector-telephony OCA project.

• the module sale_tax_included_excluded which aims at being able to properly manage prices with tax included and tax excluded at the same time, which is under review in the sale-workflow OCA project.

• several small modules to enhance the usability of the new stock management system of Odoo 8: stock_transfer_split_multi, which is now part of the stock-logistics-workflow OCA project, and the modules stock_packaging_usability and stock_packaging_usability_ul, which are under review in the stock-logistics-tracking OCA project.

The contributions of the Barroux Abbey also implied porting many community modules to version 8, reporting and fixing 22 bugs in the official modules and 13 bugs in community modules (full list here) and enhancing several OCA modules, including the module that manages check deposits named account_check_deposit. Other community modules have been developed and published on the Github branches of Akretion: the module account_statement_completion_label_simple that automatically sets the partners from the labels of the bank statement lines, the module partner_relation that handle the relations between partners (X recommends Y, A is part of the familly of B, etc...), the module bank_statement_import_camt that handle the import of SEPA CAMT .052 and .053 bank statement files and many small usability modules published on the odoo-usability project of Akretion.

“Odoo version 8 was officially released on September 18th 2014, and it went live at the Barroux Abbey on January 1st 2015: it is one of the first large project to go live on version 8 with so many applications. I am very proud of this deployment and of all the free software contributions that we made during this project. We hope that the new Odoo modules that we released as free software and published on Github will benefit to other abbeys, other non-profit organizations and other corporate users of Odoo“, declares Alexis de Lattre, engineer at Akretion.