Analytical accounting in Odoo is a powerful tool that allows businesses to monitor and analyze their cash flow on a granular level. It provides detailed insights into revenues and expenditures, which can be broken down by individual projects or departments. This in-depth understanding of financial operations can assist companies in budgeting, forecasting, and making informed decisions.
Starting from version 16, Odoo introduced changes to its analytical accounting feature. One of the key changes is the concept of Analytic Distribution, which defines how debits or credits are divided among different analytic accounts within an analytic plan.
To enable analytical accounting in Odoo, navigate to Accounting Configuration -> Settings and search for "analytical accounting".
Once enabled, you will notice several new options in the configuration menu.
Analytic Plan
An Analytic Plan is a grouping of analytic accounts that you want to break down into, such as departments, projects, or branches. You can create multiple plans with different dimensions and analytic accounts to track your accounting.
For instance, you can create a plan called "Vehicle" with a hierarchy of analytic accounts. The "Default Applicability" setting determines how the plan is applied:
- Optional: It won't prevent the entry from being created, but you are free to choose to fill it out.
- Mandatory: Every time you create an accounting entry, it is mandatory to fill the account 100%.
- Unavailable: You will not be able to fill it in.
You can also specify the applicability in more detail. For example, you can make an account mandatory for invoices and bills for a particular account.
If the mandatory analytic is not set, an Validation Error will be raised when confirming the entry.
Additionally, a red highlight will appear on the percentage of the analytic distribution when we select the configured account on the bill or invoice.
You can add analytic accounts to the plan to group them together.
Analytic Distribution
Analytic Distribution allows you to automatically apply the analytic distribution to a specific account, partner, or product. For example, when you select a partner configured in the analytic distribution, the configured distribution will be automatically populated.
There's also a quick way to set up analytic distribution. By clicking "New Model", you can directly create an analytic distribution model from the lines.
Analytic Entries
Analytic Entries are created when you generate bills, entries and invoices. These entries reflect the distribution of costs and revenues as per your analytic plans and distributions.
When creating a Vendor Bill, Invoice, Journal Entry etc, select the analytics plan or manually select the analytic account for each of the entry lines accordingly. Once the record is posted, it will automatically create the analytic entries for the newly created record.
Odoo's analytical accounting provides a comprehensive and flexible way to track and analyze your financial operations. By leveraging analytic plans and distributions, you can gain a deeper understanding of your business's financial performance and make more informed decisions.