Odoo 20: the new features that will really make a difference

In previous years, you came back from Odoo Experience with a list of new buttons, reports and settings. This year was different. Our business analysts attended dozens of talks, and almost everywhere the same message came back: Odoo 20 is the agentic version. AI no longer sits in a separate chat window, it does real work in every app. And you stay the one who decides.

We put all their notes side by side. These are the new features that we believe will make a difference for our clients, and the points where it pays to be careful.

01AI becomes a colleague, not a gadget

In Odoo 20, you work with several AI agents, each with its own task: one for the website, one for the helpdesk, one for accounting. You decide what an agent is allowed to do and which data it can access. A few examples from the demos:

• "I'm going on holiday, reassign all my opportunities to my colleague." The agent finds the opportunities, asks you for confirmation, then updates them all in one go.
• Helpdesk: the assistant looks for similar tickets that have already been solved and suggests a solution based on them.
• Studio: AI fields fill in data automatically from a prompt, for example to classify the notes of a phone call. AI can also be used in automations and in email templates, so a message adapts itself to the customer.

A lot has changed under the hood as well. In Odoo 19, a server worker stayed blocked while the AI was thinking. In Odoo 20, processing is asynchronous. For sensitive actions, the agent first asks for human approval (human in the loop), and it works within the user's access rights.

02Accounting on (almost) autopilot

Accounting got a lot of attention this year, and rightly so.

• An AI accounting assistant in the chat. Ask for an overview of invoices based on several criteria, and you get a table or chart right away, without setting any filters yourself. The assistant checks whether the right accounts are used, spots anomalies in your profit and loss, and can import a trial balance from a PDF.
• Documents that sort themselves. In the Documents app, AI analyses the content and puts the document in the right place, for example an insurance policy in the right folder. Vendor bills are filled in, assets are created from the bill lines and journal entries are prepared as drafts.
• Pay your suppliers from Odoo. Click Pay on a vendor bill, confirm in your banking environment, and the payment is done.
• Small things that save a lot of time. You can attach files (PDF, Excel…) to invoices sent via Peppol, mark invoices as "to check" and send reminders in bulk. Closing is clearer too: you see exactly what is left to do. Finally, VAT returns for foreign countries get simpler: create a fiscal position for France, for example, and Odoo creates all French VAT rates in one click.

03Less typing, more approving

The general trend across the apps: you type less and approve suggestions more often.

• Timesheet assistant: suggests time entries based on your activity, with description, duration and task, and learns from the corrections you make. Odoo estimates the gain at around ten minutes per person per day.
• Helpdesk: recordings and transcripts of incoming calls are automatically attached to the ticket.
• CRM, projects and subscriptions move closer together. You can create a project straight from an opportunity, so pre-sales hours are logged correctly. You also see right away whether a lead already has running subscriptions, which makes upselling much easier.
• Sales: you can save and reuse quotation templates, choose packaging directly in the catalog and invoice usage above the ordered quantity.

04Excel can start thinking about retirement

In Odoo 20, you build spreadsheets and dashboards entirely from within the spreadsheet itself. You add dynamic lists, choose columns, create your own calculations and filter pivot tables with a domain. There is a new chart type (the bubble chart), and dashboards also display properly on mobile. Project profitability now lives in reports you can add to a spreadsheet, with your own formulas and KPIs.

A slow dashboard on a large volume of data? Via Ctrl+K > Performance, you immediately see where the bottleneck is. Our advice: only load the data you need, and use pivot tables rather than a huge list you then calculate on yourself.

Drone manufacturer Orbital UAV replaced its Excel files with live Odoo dashboards: real-time project margins, fewer meetings and 20% less stock.

05On the ground: rental, warehouse, point of sale and offline

• Rental: you no longer need two products to sell and rent the same item, the rental period on the order makes the difference. Seasonal prices and discounts are set in a few clicks in a calendar, and employee time off is taken into account in availability.
• Warehouse: ZPL labels and other printers work without an IoT box. All labels have been refreshed, and barcode flows and batch picking got new options.
• Purchase: your suppliers' quality rate appears directly on their contact form.
• Restaurant: you manage it entirely from your smartphone, from scheduling and stock to taking orders at the table. With NFC, your smartphone also becomes a payment terminal.
• Offline mode: part of the apps keeps working without internet, provided you opened them online beforehand. Changes are synchronised as soon as the connection is back. Watch out: if two people edit the same record offline, the last synchronisation wins.

06Moving to Odoo 20? Look at your customisations first

Odoo 20 runs on Owl 3, a new version of the JavaScript framework behind the interface. In the long run, customisations become more powerful and need less code. For databases with a lot of custom JavaScript, however, the step from 19 to 20 will be heavier than usual, because the foundations have changed. Odoo provides a compatibility layer and migration scripts, and also counts on AI to help.

Odoo also presented an open-source tool that upgrades and tests modules one by one using AI agents. It is promising, but it does not replace a thorough test with real data by someone who knows the client's processes. Our approach stays the same: first map out the customisations, then plan.