Introduction
Every CFO knows the golden rule: profit is not cash.
Your company may look great on paper — invoices issued, revenues recognized — but if the money is not yet in your bank account, you can’t pay suppliers, salaries, or taxes.
This is exactly where many ERP systems, including Odoo, fail. Out of the box, Odoo only tracks accruals. It shows invoices, bills, and expenses, but it doesn’t give you a clear plan of real cash inflows and outflows. As a result, financial managers often rely on spreadsheets to plan liquidity.
At ERPixel, we decided to fix this gap. That’s why we created the Cash Flow Budgeting module for Odoo ERP.
The Problem
In standard Odoo there is no concept of:
- Cash Flow Budgets (you can’t plan actual receipts and payments),
- Direct Method of Cash Flow (you only see accounting entries, not money movements).
This makes it nearly impossible to answer simple questions like:
- How much cash will we have at the end of the month?
- Can we fund a new marketing campaign without overdraft?
- Which project or department is overspending compared to plan?
The Solution: Odoo Cash Flow Budgeting Module
Our module introduces Cash Flow Budgets directly into Odoo Accounting. It gives finance teams the ability to plan, approve, and analyze money movements in real time — without leaving Odoo.
Here’s what you can do:
- Plan your cash – Create budgets by department, cost center, or project. Decide whether you want to plan incoming payments, outgoing payments, or both.
- Define budget lines – Each line is a payment or receipt with supplier, amount, currency, expected date, and even VAT if needed. Odoo automatically recalculates amounts into the budget currency.
- Stay in control – Budgets go through approval inside Odoo. Managers receive notifications to review, approve, or reject. Only approved budgets move to analytics.
- Build scenarios – Use the “New Version” feature to prepare alternative cash flow scenarios and compare them.
- Track actuals automatically – When accountants record bank transactions, the system updates the corresponding budget lines. No more manual updates.
- Analyze in depth – Slice results by partner, responsible manager, department, cost center, or period. Forecasts combine actuals and remaining planned payments.
Why It Matters
With this module, finance leaders can finally rely on Odoo to manage liquidity, not just accounting.
Instead of juggling spreadsheets, you get:
- Clear visibility into future cash positions,
- Better control of spending against the plan,
- Faster decisions when unexpected costs appear.
In other words — you don’t just record cash flow, you manage it.
Announcement:
For companies where payments require approval, we’ve developed a dedicated feature — Payment Request. Fully integrated with the Odoo Cash Flow Budgeting Module, it ensures that every payment is planned, approved, and controlled within your cash flow process.
For Those Who Want Details
Our Cash Flow Budgeting module includes a full set of professional features:
- Document structure: Each budget has a name, period, currency, department, cost center, and owner. Budgets can be grouped, filtered, and searched easily.
- Budget Lines: Define partner, amount, currency, planned date, notes, and Cash Flow analytic account. Negative values = outgoing payments, positive = incoming receipts.
- Multi-currency support: Budgets may include lines in different currencies. Exchange rates are stored in the document; Odoo recalculates totals automatically.
- Approval stages: Draft → Under Review → Approved → Rejected → Cancelled. Approval is built into Odoo workflow.
- New versions: Create a revised version of any budget, with links to the original document.
- Automatic actuals: Paid Amounts are updated based on bank and cash transactions recorded in Odoo.
- Analytics: Pivot views show planned vs actual vs variation. You can group by owner, period, cost center, department, partner, or analytic account. Forecasts help calculate remaining obligations for the year.
Conclusion
Cash is the fuel of business. Without proper planning, even profitable companies may face liquidity crises.
With ERPixel’s Cash Flow Budgeting module for Odoo ERP, CFOs and finance teams finally get what they need:
- Plan upcoming cash flows,
- Control execution through approvals,
- Monitor actual results automatically,
- Analyze deviations and forecast liquidity.
You get peace of mind — because now your ERP speaks the language of cash.
