This is for the owner of a small Australian shop — one to three locations, a handful of casuals on the register, maybe a website — who is wondering whether Odoo can replace the pile of tools they're currently paying for. Below is what Odoo Community actually does at the till and behind it, the settings that matter here (GST, 5c rounding, ABN on receipts), and the places where the free edition stops and you need a workaround.
What Odoo gives a shop that a till alone doesn't
Odoo Community covers four systems you'd otherwise buy separately: a point of sale, stock control across locations, a product catalogue with variants and barcodes, and an online store. They share one product list and one customer list. That's the entire point — you stop reconciling an online store's inventory count against a spreadsheet against what's actually on the shelf.
Be clear about what you're choosing. Odoo's POS is one module inside a broader business system, not a standalone till product, and it's designed for people who also want purchasing, multi-location stock and eCommerce in the same database. If your business is one register, no stockroom and no website, a dedicated POS product may be a simpler fit. If you have two shops, a stockroom, a website and someone raising purchase orders, Odoo starts to earn its keep.
Setting up the point of sale
Install Point of Sale from Apps. Go to Point of Sale > Configuration > Point of Sale and create one record per register or per shop — a two-store retailer with one till each has two POS records, each pointed at its own stock location.
- Cash control — switch it on so staff count the float at open and close. The session summary shows the difference between counted and expected cash, which is the quickest way to spot a till drifting before it becomes a month-end mystery.
- Bills & Receipts — set the receipt header and footer with your trading name, address and ABN, and make sure the GST amount prints. A GST-registered customer will ask for a tax invoice so they can claim the credit, and your POS receipt is usually the document that does that job. Confirm the exact wording and layout with your accountant.
- Cash rounding — 1c and 2c coins are no longer in circulation, so cash totals round to the nearest 5c. In Invoicing > Configuration > Cash Rounding, create a method with precision 0.05 and rounding method Half-Up, choose whether it adds a rounding line or adjusts the tax, then enable it in the POS settings and set it to apply to cash payments only so card sales still take the exact cent.
- Payment methods — create Cash plus one for your card terminal. Be realistic here: Community doesn't ship with a ready-made link to the Australian EFTPOS terminals most shops use, so check your provider before you assume one exists. The common approach is to run the terminal beside the till, tender the total in Odoo as a card payment, and match it against the day's card takings your bank deposits. A tighter link is a build, not a checkbox — see custom development.
Hardware: check before you buy
Barcode scanners, receipt printers and cash drawers all vary by model, connection type and firmware, and Odoo's POS supports some configurations and not others. Do not buy on assumption. Give your supplier the Odoo version you'll be running and ask them to confirm compatibility in writing, and test a scanner by scanning into a plain text field before you commit to a fleet of them. Odoo's IoT Box app, which handles scales and various USB-only devices, is an Enterprise feature and is not part of what we host.
Products, barcodes and pricelists
Set the barcode on each product in Inventory > Products, on the General Information tab. If you sell apparel or anything with size and colour, use variants: one product, attributes for size and colour, and Odoo creates a separate variant record for each sellable combination, each with its own stock figure and its own barcode field. Odoo does not invent barcode values for you — you enter the supplier's barcode, or your own, against each variant. For a sizeable range that's an afternoon of data entry, so plan for it.
For trade pricing, staff discounts or a stocktake sale, turn on Multiple prices per product in the Sales settings and build pricelists keyed to quantity, date range or customer group. Each register can be given a list of pricelists the cashier can switch between mid-sale.
Stock across a stockroom and shopfloor
Create a warehouse per physical site under Inventory > Configuration > Warehouses. Moving goods from the stockroom to the shopfloor is an internal transfer, and completing a sale on a register reduces stock at that register's location automatically.
Two features do most of the work. Reordering rules (a minimum and maximum per product) feed the Replenishment screen, which becomes your buying list. Physical Inventory under Inventory > Operations lets you type counted quantities and post the adjustment. Note that Odoo's Barcode app — scanning your way through pickings and stocktakes — is Enterprise. In Community you scan at the till and key counts on screen: workable for a shop, tedious for a warehouse.
GST, BAS and where Xero or MYOB still fits
Install the Australia - Accounting localisation before you raise a single invoice. It loads an Australian chart of accounts and the tax codes you need — GST 10%, GST Free, Input Taxed — and you then set the right tax on every product so receipts and invoices calculate correctly.
The honest limit: Odoo's ready-made BAS report and its click-through profit & loss and balance sheet are Enterprise features, not Community ones. Community still records every transaction and holds all the tax data; you just have to pull the figures yourself. The workable route is Invoicing > Accounting > Journal Items, filter to your quarter, then Group By > Add Custom Group > Originator Tax. That gives you sales and purchases totalled by tax code, which is what G1, 1A and 1B are built from. Free add-ons published by the Odoo Community Association — account_financial_report for general ledger and trial balance, or MIS Builder for custom statements — can be installed on our hosting. Neither produces a lodgement-ready BAS; they get you clean numbers to work from. Third-party add-ons like these can't be installed on Odoo Online at all.
Plenty of shops therefore run Odoo for trading and keep Xero or MYOB as the ledger for BAS and payroll, posting a daily or monthly sales summary and supplier bills across. Before assuming you must pay for an upgrade, read Community vs Enterprise.
Click-and-collect from the same catalogue
Website and eCommerce are both in Community. Publish products from the same catalogue and online orders draw down the same stock. Add a delivery method of Pickup in store pointed at the shop's warehouse and you have click-and-collect without a second system. Online payment providers are configured under the Website settings; which ones are available depends on your Odoo version.
What it costs, and the next step
Retail runs on casuals, and every casual needs a login. ERPForge pricing is flat and never per user: $29/month for up to 5 users or $79/month for up to 15, AUD plus GST, with every Community app included on every plan. We host on AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2), your data stays in Australia, nightly backups are kept 7 days, and SSL is included.
Build a live demo instance from the chat on the homepage — it takes about five minutes — then do one thing with it: set up a single register, load three real products with your actual barcodes, turn on 5c rounding and ring up a cash sale. If the receipt and the GST come out right, the rest is configuration. If you need the EFTPOS link or a supplier feed, scope it in writing first.
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