The file we all share
An Excel workbook on SharePoint or Google Drive. One tab per employee, columns per project, formulas that break the moment someone inserts a row in the wrong spot. On the 1st of the month, you're chasing three people to fill in their month-end before billing goes out.
The problem isn't Excel. It's that the hours live in one file and the projects live somewhere else. You can't tell where you stand halfway through a mandate. You can't spot an overrun before it's been burned. Comparing planned vs. actual happens by hand, in a separate tab, whenever you get a spare second.
Odoo puts the pieces back together by placing the timesheets on the tasks themselves. Same data, same place. Here's what that changes in practice.
How it plays out day to day
You create a project. You add tasks on a kanban board (To Do, In Progress, Done). On each task, you set the planned hours before kicking it off: that's the budget per deliverable. You assign the task to someone, with a priority, a due date and tags as needed.
When the employee gets to work, they open the task, scroll down to the Timesheets tab and enter a line: 2 hours, Tuesday, "drafting the quote." The line adds to the project total, the task's progress bar changes colour if you go over, and the project-level total updates on its own.
It works, but opening the task to log 15 minutes is clunky. Enterprise's weekly grid (projects as rows, days as columns, you fill in the week like a calendar) is noticeably faster. So is the built-in timer: one click to start, one click to stop. And the approval step: the manager validates their team's week before it goes to billing.
The OCA brings those three pieces back with the hr_timesheet_sheet module. It isn't a pixel-for-pixel copy of Enterprise, but the grid is there, and so is the submission/approval workflow. For most service SMBs, that's what matters.
Seeing the overrun before it costs you
This is where Odoo wins over Excel. On every task, allocated hours and actual hours sit side by side, all the time. At the project level, you see the running total instantly: total planned, total logged, percentage consumed.
A mandate budgeted at 60 hours that has already burned 55 with two deliverables still to go: you see it before the invoice goes to the client. You can call ahead. Renegotiate ahead. Or go into the red knowingly, not in a post-mortem.
From timesheet to invoice
A "service based on timesheets" type of product tied to a sales order: every hour logged on the project becomes billable. Three modes depending on the type of mandate.
Fixed price for packages: the invoice is known in advance, the hours serve internal tracking. Time and materials for hourly work: every hour goes into the next invoice at the agreed rate. Milestones for long projects: the invoice triggers when defined stages are reached, while the timesheets document the effort in the background.
When it's time to bill, you pick the period, Odoo adds it all up, and the draft invoice is ready. No more manual transposing between the hours file and the billing system.
Community or Enterprise: where the line is drawn
To clarify what's native, what comes through the OCA and what requires Enterprise:
| Feature | Community | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Kanban tasks + planned hours | Included | Included |
| Time entry on the task | Included | Included |
| Time and materials billing | Included (with Sales module) | Included |
| Weekly grid | Via OCA module | Included |
| Built-in timer | Via OCA module | Included |
| Approval workflow | Via OCA module | Included |
| Resource scheduling | Not available | Separate Planning module |
| Forecasting | Not available | Dedicated module |
| Native mobile app | Not available | Included |
For an SMB of 5 to 50 people moving off Excel, Community with the right OCA modules covers the essentials. The Enterprise features become worthwhile once you're juggling dozens of resources across nested projects. Before that, it's complexity that adds nothing.
What Odoo won't fix for you
Logging discipline. No tool enters the hours in the employees' place. Odoo makes the gesture faster than Excel, that's all. If the culture of daily logging isn't there, Enterprise's timer won't change that either.
Maintaining the OCA modules. They're maintained by the community, not by Odoo SA. At every version upgrade, you have to check that the modules you use have been ported. It's doable, it's our daily bread, but it takes an integrator who keeps up with the ecosystem. In practical terms: if you want to jump on the very latest Odoo version as soon as it ships, first check whether hr_timesheet_sheet is already available there. If not, you stay on the previous stable version until the community catches up.
Full financial profitability. Odoo shows consumed vs. planned hours. The real per-project P&L (revenue minus loaded salaries, allocated overhead) takes a deeper analytic configuration. It isn't plug-and-play.
The link to expenses. If your mandates carry costs on top of time, the Expenses module attaches to the same project and gives the full-cost picture.
Our recommendation to get started:
- Install Project and configure planned hours per task.
- Add hr_timesheet_sheet from the OCA for the grid and approval.
- Plug in the Sales module for time-based billing.
- Start with a pilot project before migrating all your mandates.
At Blue Fox
We deploy Odoo Community with the OCA modules you need, hosted in Quebec on servers under your control. No per-user licence, your code and data with you.
In concrete terms for timesheets: we install the modules, plug them into your projects and your billing, and train the team on daily logging. It's that last step that makes or breaks the rollout, more than the technology. If your needs later evolve toward advanced resource scheduling, we look together at whether an OCA module is enough or whether Enterprise becomes the right move.
Still managing your hours in a shared file? Let's talk about your time tracking and look together at how Odoo can lighten your billing.