How to Create Milestone Products in Odoo

It is always important to set up milestone invoices in a systematic way throughout the project lifetime, while paying each step of your budget into an account once the milestone is reached. Milestone invoicing allows contractors to write an invoice for each milestone of the project, which will be paid at the end of their completion.

The best option is to create milestone products for projects with complex budgets that call for multiple phases to set up. This method is comfortable both for the company, which is ensured to get a steady cash flow throughout the project lifetime, and for the client, who can monitor individual milestones and pay in several installments. By deploying Odoo, business owners can easily set up milestone products for multiple projects as well as send milestone invoices to their customers. Now, we will go into detail about How to create milestone products in Odoo with just 3 quick and easy steps.

Table of Contents

• What is the importance of milestone products?
• How to create milestone products in Odoo
  • Step 1. Configure products
  • Step 2. Set up project module
  • Step 3. Create milestone products invoices
• The Bottom Line

What is the importance of milestone products?

Setting up milestone products is the ideal option for projects with high budgets and complex budgets, where there are several stages of work. The project’s complexity and number of stages make it impossible to estimate everything upfront. For complicated projects, milestone products are often deployed by e-commerce business owners. Each milestone specifies a certain order of tasks that will be performed in order to gradually complete the contract.

With the help of both milestone products and milestone invoicing, the client may track the development of the project and make payments in installments. On the other hand, the company can ensure that they get a consistent cash flow throughout the lifespan of the project.

How to create milestone products in Odoo

Step 1. Configure products

One thing you should know about milestones is that in Odoo, each and every product is regarded as a separate milestone. For this reason, if you want to create a milestone product in Odoo, you will have to configure the products beforehand.

In order to configure your product, you can easily head to any product form to turn them into milestone products. The first thing you would want to do in the product form is to look for the General Information section. There, you can scroll down to find the Product Type. Next, change your product type to Service.

After setting up the correct product type, all you have to do now is to configure the invoice. In order to do so, go to the Sales tab. There, you should be able to find the Invoicing section. After clicking on the section, you can see the Invoice based on field. Because we need to create milestone products, you need to select the Milestones option, and you are all done with this step.

Step 2. Set up project module

If you want to set up milestone products in Odoo, the next thing you need to do is to do some configurations of the project module. To do that, you will have to go to the Projects section in your Odoo account. Splitting your project into smaller parts within the Projects section will make your workload much simpler to handle. You can divide each series of work into many milestones and accomplish them based on any order.

In the Projects section, look for the Milestones tab and click on it. Then, you can find the Milestones smart button within the description window, as shown in the illustration below:

This article will take a closer look at a sample product. For the project of this product, we will make it a brand new one. Because of this, the project has just achieved its first-ever milestone. Based on this first milestone, we can now set up an invoice for the milestone product.

Now, you can head back to the Sales section to check your progress. If you have set up everything properly up until this point, then the configuration process should look like the screenshot below. Pay close attention to the Product Type, Invoicing Policy, as well as Create on Order fields to see if you have followed the steps correctly.

If everything in the three important fields is the same as in the above picture, you can move on to the next step. If not, double-check to see if you have incorrectly configured any step along the way and fix it. That said, if you only want to create milestone products as a test, you can stop at this step. However, if you want to use the milestone you just created for invoicing, then let us go to the next step.

Step 3. Create milestone products invoices

Moving on to the third and final step to creating milestone products in Odoo, we will start setting up milestone product invoices. First, you will need to go to the Sales Orders tab, under the Sales section. The next step is to set up a sales order for a specific product you are working on.

As you can see in the illustration above, in the Sales Orders tab, each of the sales order lines stands for one milestone project, which is also a milestone product. The milestone products can be easily invoiced to the customers, which is what we want to do in this step.

In order to create milestone product invoices to send to your customers, you will need to configure the Delivered Quantity. If you leave it for Odoo to handle, which will be the default setting, the process will easily be complete. Then, the order lines within the sales order tab will display the delivered quantity of your customer’s product. That said, if you want to, you also have the option to set the delivered quantity manually. You can easily do so once the product reaches its milestone.

And the final thing to do is to select the Create Invoice button and you are all done. Once you click on the button, Odoo will automatically generate the milestone products invoices and send them to your customers based on your settings. One more tip is that after the invoice is created and sent, you can also utilize the Register Payment option in order to complete the transaction process with your customers.

The Bottom Line

The best solution for projects with large budgets and complicated budgets that include numerous phases of work is milestone invoicing. It is hard to estimate everything up front due to the project’s complexity and quantity of stages. Throughout the course of the project, it’s crucial to collect invoices in a methodical manner, depositing each budgeted amount into an account whenever the milestone has been accomplished.

Milestone invoicing is, without a doubt, a very popular method of project work. It helps both parties involved in the project to accurately track their progress, as well as help both parties manage expenditures. This is why many business owners often choose to use this feature on Odoo.

In this post, we have gone through the 3 simple steps on How to create milestone products in Odoo. We hope you can utilize the tips and tricks provided in this document to set up your own milestone products successfully.