Getting started with Odoo Accounting for an Australian business

This guide is for an Australian small-business owner who has decided to try Odoo Community and now has to make the books work. By the end of it you should have a database with the Australian chart of accounts loaded, GST taxes configured to match how you actually price, an invoice PDF that meets ATO tax invoice rules, opening balances against a sensible go-live date — and a clear view of what the free edition won't do for you at BAS time.

First, be clear what you're installing

In Odoo Community the app you install is called Invoicing. It gives you a proper double-entry set of books — a chart of accounts, journals, taxes, customer invoices, supplier bills, payments, manual journal entries and manual reconciliation.

What it does not include is the Enterprise accounting layer. The assisted bank reconciliation screen, automated bank feeds, the interactive Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss reports, asset schedules, automated debtor follow-up and the built-in Australian BAS report sit behind the Enterprise licence. Those are not part of what we host, and we won't pretend otherwise — Community vs Enterprise sets out the split. Read the limits section at the end of this article before you plan a migration off Xero or MYOB.

Step 1: Company details and the Australian fiscal localisation

Have a database in front of you before you start reading menus. The chat on our homepage builds a live demo instance in about five minutes, so you can click through these steps rather than imagine them.

• Go to Settings > Users & Companies > Companies and open your company. Set the legal name and address, put your ABN in the Tax ID field, and set the currency to AUD.
• Set the timezone on your own user record (Settings > Users) to Australia/Sydney or your state. This drives invoice dates and report cut-offs.
• Install Invoicing from the Apps menu.
• Then the important one: Accounting > Configuration > Settings > Fiscal Localisation, choose the Australia package, and save. This loads the Australian chart of accounts and the GST tax set.
• On the same settings page, set the fiscal year end to 30 June.

Do the localisation before you post anything. Odoo restricts how much of the chart of accounts you can swap out once journal entries exist, so treat it as a decision you make once. If you're unsure which package you want, make that call on a throwaway demo database first.

Step 2: Get GST right before you invoice anything

Open Accounting > Configuration > Taxes. The Australian package gives you GST on sales and purchases at 10%, plus GST Free, Input Taxed and Export variants. Two things to settle now:

• Tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive pricing. If your shelf or website prices include GST, tick Included in Price on your sales tax. If you quote B2B ex-GST, leave it off. Mixing the two after you've issued invoices causes rounding arguments with customers.
• Cash or accrual GST. Many small businesses report GST on a cash basis. Before you commit to Odoo for BAS-relevant numbers, sit down with your bookkeeper and test on a demo database whether the tax settings in your Odoo version produce the cash-basis figures they expect — open a tax record and look at how the tax due and grid mapping options behave, then post a test invoice and pay it a month later. Don't assume; check the numbers you'd actually put on a BAS.

Then set defaults under Settings > Accounting > Default Taxes so new products pick up 10% GST automatically rather than relying on staff memory.

Step 3: Make your invoice an actual tax invoice

The ATO requires specific content on a tax invoice: the words "Tax invoice", your identity and ABN, the date of issue, a description of what was supplied, the GST amount (or a statement that the total includes GST), and — for taxable sales of $1,000 or more — the buyer's identity or ABN.

Go to Settings > General Settings > Companies > Configure Document Layout to add your logo, company details and a footer with your BSB and account number for EFT payments. Then post a test invoice and download the PDF. Check it line by line against that ATO list — in particular, check whether the document is headed "Tax invoice". If it isn't, the heading lives in the underlying report template, which is a file rather than a settings field. That's a small, contained change on self-hosted Odoo or Odoo.sh, and it is simply not possible on odoo.com's SaaS, which won't accept custom modules at all. If you'd rather not touch templates, we scope that kind of work fixed-price with the detail written down first — see custom Odoo development.

Step 4: Opening balances and a clean go-live date

Pick a cut-over that lines up with a BAS quarter — 1 July or 1 January is easiest. Then:

• Enter each unpaid customer invoice and supplier bill individually, dated in the past, so aged receivables and payables are real and payments can still be matched to them.
• Post one opening journal entry (Accounting > Accounting > Journal Entries) dated the day before go-live for everything else: bank balances, GST control accounts, loans, equity.
• Import contacts via Contacts > Favourites > Import records, with columns for name, ABN, email and payment terms.
• Invoice numbers come from a sequence. If you want to continue numbering from your old system rather than start at 0001, turn on developer mode (Settings > General Settings > Developer Tools > Activate developer mode) and edit the relevant record under Settings > Technical > Sequences & Identifiers > Sequences before you post your first invoice.

Step 5: Payments and reconciliation without bank feeds

Community has no bank feeds and no assisted matching screen. What you do have: register payments directly on invoices and bills, and create bank statements manually under Accounting > Bank, keying or importing lines and matching them to those payments. Count your average weekly bank lines and time yourself doing twenty of them on the demo — that tells you whether manual entry suits your volume better than any general advice can.

The Odoo Community Association, a non-profit that publishes community-built modules, maintains add-ons in the accounting space, including statement import tools. We haven't verified any specific module against your Odoo version or your bank's export format, and we won't claim one works until it's been tested. Because your instance is yours rather than shared SaaS, extra modules can be installed — evaluating and deploying a third-party add-on is scoped and quoted like any other development work. See how the hosting works.

BAS and payroll: be honest with yourself

There is no BAS report in Community. You can pull GST figures from the tax lines on journal entries using a pivot view, but you or your bookkeeper will be assembling G1, 1A and 1B yourselves. Payroll with Single Touch Payroll reporting to the ATO isn't available either — use a dedicated payroll product and journal the results across.

A common and perfectly sensible arrangement: run sales, inventory, projects and invoicing in Odoo, keep Xero or MYOB for BAS and payroll, and move invoice data across. Our pricing is flat AUD +GST — Starter $29/month for up to 5 users, Business $79/month for up to 15 — never per user, and every Community app is included on every plan. Your data sits on AWS in Sydney with nightly backups kept 7 days and SSL included. More setup guides are on the learn page, or start a scoped piece of work at custom start.