In the first part of this story we described our long quest for the perfect system to run a digital agency – a journey that took us from countless CRM tools to the ambitious decision to roll out the Odoo ERP system. We were inspired by the software reputation, extensive functionality and the perspective to cover our needs – from project management to financial reporting.
Unfortunately, we knew too little about Odoo, and the contractor helping us configure it knew too little about us. Implementing Odoo Community dragged on for 24 months and ended up setting us back nearly $20K. Today we’ll talk about the most expensive mistakes we made during the first 14 months of that journey.
Where It All Began: CRM and Projects Modules – Our First-Tier Goals
At the start of our automation project, our focus was clearly defined. With over 80 active projects, we acutely felt the need for a convenient task tracker. That’s why the “Projects” module became our top priority – it was meant to address our most urgent and critically important needs:
- Task Setup Optimization: Establish a convenient and intuitive task-setting process, including deadlines and assigned team members.
- Workload Control and Management: Make team workload information accessible – daily, weekly and monthly – to enable hourly planning for upcoming periods.
- Centralized Information Storage: Ensure that all project information is available and stored in one place.
- Time Tracking: Provide the ability to see how much time specialists spent on each project and individual task – that was a prerequisite for fair billing.
- Project Profitability Analysis: A key goal was to clearly understand the profitability of each project.
- Earnings Analytics: Calculate monthly project revenue based on the number of logged hours and the hourly rate of each specialist.
Thus, we concluded that our project management goals were closely related to the next strategically important module – management accounting.
Even at that stage, we understood that our ultimate goal was to link the work completed on projects to their related income and expenses, including specialists’ salaries. Implementing the CRM and Project Management modules laid the foundation for future management accounting.
Our implementation partner we started the Odoo rollout with, outlined the initial project plan, which included:
- database deployment,
- user onboarding,
- step-by-step configuration and training on the CRM and Project Management modules,
At the time, it seemed we had a clear path forward.
The Fall: The Cost of Lacking Strategic Vision and Team Resistance
Despite having an initial plan, the reality of implementing Odoo Community turned out to be far more complex – and expensive – than we had imagined. The main challenges and “falls” we experienced included:
- Lack of Strategic Vision from the Contractor
First and foremost, we encountered a serious problem with the initial project manager from our contractor’s side. He agreed to all our customization requests without a solid strategic vision of how Odoo should function within a digital agency. This was critical – Odoo is a system that requires a degree of adaptation on the user’s part, not the other way around. Yes, it allows deep customization, but such “thoughtless” customizations often lead to consequences that, months later, become major headaches.
A vivid example: setting up project templates and timesheets. We required a system where, once a service (e.g., SEO) was selected by a sales manager, a project would be created from a template with predefined tasks organized into milestones: one milestone for the project manager and another for the specialist responsible for that task completion. If an upsell occurred later (e.g., PPC), another task set with similar milestones would be added to the same project, but for the new service.
Initially, this setup seemed convenient. But over time, it became apparent that all tasks turned out to be logged under the original service (SEO). As a result, time logged by the PPC specialist was incorrectly attributed to SEO. We couldn’t track how much time was spent separately on SEO versus PPC.
By the time we detected the problem (six months of active use), we had over 7,000 tasks that had to be manually re-sorted by service.
Not only did we have to pay for a custom filter to view the data correctly, we also had to develop a script to help identify which milestone a task belonged to. All unidentified tasks, including archived, cancelled or already completed, had to be manually sorted.
Eventually, we realized we didn’t just need specific milestones for each service (e.g., “SEO PM Milestone”, “SEO Specialist Milestone”, “PPC PM Milestone”, etc.), but also a “Service” tag for each task and a correct “Sales Order Line Item”. The latter element is critical because it connects the task to a commercial offer in the Sales module and, ultimately, displays the logged time in the management accounting module – directly affecting salary allocation for the specialists working on that project.
And this was just one of many issues that arose due to the contractor’s lack of strategic oversight.
2. Team Resistance: The Hardest Challenge
Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all was the resistance from our team. The shift to Odoo Community proved much more difficult for employees than we had expected – especially after the relatively simple interface of Worksection. The team did everything they could to avoid working in the new system.
However, we managed to engage the team through several deliberate actions:
- Involving heads of departments: Team leads helped develop detailed task checklists, which became the foundation for the milestone templates. This gave them a sense of ownership and understanding of changes.
- Intensive training: We conducted more than 12 training sessions for the entire company and individual departments. These sessions helped everyone better understand Odoo’s functionality and benefits. We also created a knowledge base with video tutorials that employees could return to anytime.
- Careful configuration of access levels: This became another major challenge. We had to reconfigure different access permissions more than six times for various roles in the company. Not all specialists should have access to all system functions, which led to difficulties, especially with:
- Time tracking: We wanted to ensure no one could edit another person’s timesheet – or their own from the previous day. This encouraged punctual reporting and helped prevent manipulation. However, these settings frequently broke – either due to system bugs or incorrect implementation by the contractor.
- Project editing access: Only certain authorized users could modify projects.
- Access to sales, invoices and employee contacts: We restricted these areas to prevent unauthorized changes to employee profiles, ensuring only responsible individuals had access.
A Special Pain: The False Hope of the Gantt Chart
One of the most frustrating challenges we faced was the implementation of the Gantt Chart. We genuinely believed that the Gantt Chart, in its classical form, would allow us to effectively monitor team workload and enable managers to assign tasks directly into free time slots on specialists’ schedules. Hoping to achieve this, we even purchased a dedicated module compatible with our Odoo Community version. Unfortunately, it never worked properly.
The module turned out to be extremely complex to use:
- Dates and times constantly shifted or disappeared on their own.
- The specialist filter didn’t work at all.
- The interface was slow to load, making real-time adjustments nearly impossible.
It quickly became clear that for the Community version, this functionality is neither popular nor well-supported – unlike in the Enterprise version, where the Gantt Chart is a more refined built-in feature. At that stage of the project, however, switching to Enterprise was financially unjustifiable, so we had no choice but to abandon the Gantt Chart in Odoo at all. It still exists in our system, but we don’t use it.
We still lack a convenient way to view the full workload of a specialist in one place. We try filtering tasks by “Assignee” within individual projects to understand what someone’s working on. We’ve also trained specialists to assign their own deadlines for tasks. Finally, we make active use of the “My Tasks” tab, which helps each team member focus on their current responsibilities. These measures, however, cannot fully replace a true visual workload manager – especially compared to what we had before in Worksection, for example.
Example of Gantt Chart interface in Odoo Community
Example of “My Tasks” tab organization in Odoo Community
This is a perfect example of how we ended up adapting to the system, after failing to bend it to our needs. If someone had warned us before that this functionality wouldn’t be suitable or would work so poorly, we could have avoided wasting time and money on this module implementation, long-lasting communication with the developers from India and testing an interface that clearly wasn’t ready for production use.
Other Challenges of Odoo Community for LuxSite Digital Agency
In addition to the detailed issues described above, we also faced a number of more common yet significant challenges typically encountered by those who opt for the Odoo Community version. I’ll briefly outline them here to provide a broader picture:
- Unpredictable Customization Difficulty: As an open-source and “free” version, OdooCommunity requires time and effort for adaptation to our unique workflows than we anticipated. Even the smallest changes often demanded either custom development or complicated configuration.
- Lack of “Out-of-the-Box” Solutions: Unlike paid versions or other CRM systems, Odoo Community lacked many features we assumed would be standard. This led to the constant realization that “yet another thing needs fixing”, each requiring more time and more budget.
- Developer Dependency: Nearly every step or adjustment required a developer’s involvement. This not only inflated the budget, but also introduced bottlenecks, slowing the implementation process.
- Data and Migration Issues: Migrating data from our previous systems turned out to be non-trivial. Even after pre-cleaning, we ran into inaccuracies, mismatches and conflicts, which required many additional hours for manual correction.
- Unexpected Bugs and Failures: While Odoo itself is generally stable, the Community version, without official support or polished integrations, occasionally broke, leading to confusion, task rework and lost confidence from team members.
- Budget Overruns: Every new tweak, feature or hour of a developer’s time keeps adding up. Before long, our total spending had passed $10,000, and we still hadn’t fulfilled even half of our original strategic objectives.
Success Through Struggle: The Role of a Competent Manager
Over two years of working with the contractor ToDo, we went through four project managers. Only the last one, Oles Adamenko, truly managed to untangle the mess and guide the project toward success. We at LuxSite Digital Agency, and I personally, are sincerely grateful to Oles for his attention to detail and genuine involvement, deep understanding of both our needs and how to communicate them clearly to developers, organizational skills and ability to deliver structured reporting. We also appreciate his remarkable memory, pleasant communication style and authentic client-focused approach. These qualities were decisive in getting our project back on track.
Despite the many setbacks, we eventually launched and configured the key CRM and Projects modules. We finally got a centralized repository for client and project data, improved task management and availed basic level of team workload control.
Our Odoo Community implementation was a costly learning experience. It taught us that a “free” platform can become very expensive if you don’t account for hidden costs of development, support and customization, the importance of strategic vision from the very start and the critical need for clear alignment with your implementation partner.
I fully recognize that part of the financial and time-related losses are on us as the client. We didn’t invest enough effort early on in defining the scope of the project, understanding the Odoo platform and its limitations as well as outlining the specific needs and workflows of a digital marketing agency.
For LuxSite, these 14 months were filled with both frustration and insight. In the next chapter, I’ll share what happened in the remaining 10 months of work and how we finally implemented the Management Accounting module.
