Odoo has an all-in-one solution for rental businesses, offering seamless integration with other modules like Inventory, CRM, Accounting, and Sales.
This integration allows rental companies to manage their equipment, track availability, and streamline billing within a single platform, enhancing efficiency and reducing operational costs.
With automated scheduling, invoicing, and inventory management, Odoo Rental simplifies the rental workflow, making it ideal for businesses that need to manage a large volume of rentals and keep accurate records of equipment usage.
However, a key limitation of Odoo Rental Management is that it doesn’t capture specific pickup and return dates for rentals, often resulting in inaccurate billing periods and manual adjustments, particularly when rentals span partial months.
We’ve had several use cases within the Equipment Rental Industry where customers faced a common bottleneck in managing accurate rental pickup and return dates within the Odoo Rental App.
Use Case of Equipment Rental in Odoo
A prominent equipment rental company specializing in general and specialist tools, plant equipment, and consumables managed their business operations with Odoo’s suite of apps—Rental, Manufacturing, CRM, Sales, Accounting, Purchase, Inventory, and Quality.
While they were satisfied with other operations, they faced a persistent bottleneck in the Odoo Rental app and its invoicing process.
This created significant inefficiencies, especially since their business heavily relied on managing rental and return schedules for equipment.
The Problem: Managing Accurate Rental Pickup & Return Dates in Odoo
In Odoo 15, rental date management was done manually by adjusting them in Excel and then importing them back into Odoo. This workaround not only consumed valuable time but also increased the potential for errors. So, they decided to upgrade to Odoo 17 to access innovative features across their Odoo ecosystem.
While other apps added to their efficiency, the problem with rental date management still persisted. In Odoo 17, while the rental period automatically syncs with the sales order, they still had to cross-check and match the rental periods with invoice dates to ensure accurate billing.
For instance, if a customer rented equipment from November 15th to November 30th, the default Odoo setup would invoice based on the whole month, making it necessary to manually adjust dates—a task that was time-consuming and prone to errors.
This was the case of a single customer renting a single product, they had to manage hundreds of customers and their rental products.
On average, this manual process took 5–6 days every month and led to delays in invoicing, payment processing, and cash flow.
Odoo Rental Custom Solution to Fetch the exact pick-up & return date on the Invoice
We developed a custom workflow within the Odoo Rental app, automating rental date tracking and ensuring exact periods were captured in invoices without any manual intervention.
Requirements:
Custom Rental Periods: They needed the flexibility to select specific pick-up and return dates directly on the sales order lines.
Accurate Invoicing by Rental Period: The invoices needed to reflect exact rental durations, not just a blanket monthly rate, to avoid billing discrepancies.
Key Features of the Custom Odoo Rental Management Solution:
Flexible Date Selection on Sales Orders: We enabled sales order lines to allow custom pick-up and return dates for each rental, giving the company control over specific rental periods.
Automated Periodic Invoicing: The system automatically calculates and records rental durations to generate accurate invoices aligned with the specific rental dates.
Accurate Invoicing for Partial Months: If a rental period spanned multiple months, the solution splits invoicing across the months with the exact rental days specified. For instance:
If a customer Rent products in Odoo starting on November 15th and returning on December 15th, custom Odoo workflow would generate a November invoice for 15 days (November 15–30) and a December invoice for the remaining 15 days (December 1–15).
Results and Impact
With the custom Odoo Rental Management solution, the equipment rental company transitioned from 5 to 6 days of manual invoicing work to fully automated, error-free invoicing, leading to:
Zero Manual Invoicing Effort: The automation eliminated the need for Excel adjustments, freeing the team from tedious data matching.
Timely Invoices: Invoices were now accurate and issued on time, improving cash flow.
Error Reduction: Automated rental date tracking significantly reduced invoicing errors, enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing payment delays.
