Should you run payroll in Odoo? Our answer, and what we offer instead
The misunderstanding we encounter all the time
When a company chooses Odoo to run its business, the same question always comes up: "Can we also do payslips in it?"
The honest answer is no. We will explain why in simple terms, then how we solve it at ANOR for our clients.
Why Odoo does not do payroll in France
Technically, Odoo has a powerful and flexible payroll engine. That is not the problem. The real problem is that in France, no organization offers, as a subscription, permanent updates of payroll rules for the various collective bargaining agreements. And there are more than 700 of them, each with its own seniority rules, mandatory bonuses, allowances and premiums.
Without this permanent update service, running Odoo's payroll engine in France means having to keep all these rules up to date yourself, in-house: every URSSAF scale, every contribution rate that changes several times a year. That is simply untenable for an SME or a mid-sized company.
What you need to understand is that payroll in France is not a management tool: it is a regulatory profession in its own right.
Producing a correct payslip means:
- Knowing all the rules, which change several times a year.
- Calculating the right social contributions and the right taxes.
- Sending the mandatory declarations to the authorities every month.
- Applying the rules of your industry's collective agreement.
All of this is constantly moving. A new law, a new scale, and everything must be updated within the week. A mistake? An audit, penalties, or an underpaid employee.
That is why there is a dedicated profession: payroll administrator. And there is specialized software, designed exclusively for this, for which it is the core business — with a team that keeps the rules up to date for you.
Our recommendation: one tool for each job
Rather than doing everything in Odoo, we offer our clients a simple two-part solution:
- Odoo keeps what it does excellently: each employee's record, contracts, leave, working time tracking, accounting.
- OpenPaye, a specialized French software, handles payroll: payslip calculation, declarations, compliance.
- A module developed by ANOR passes information from one to the other, automatically. It is running in production today at several of our clients.
It is like having a kitchen and a dining room: two different rooms, each made for its purpose, with a door connecting them so that everything flows effortlessly.
What it changes day to day
Here, very concretely, is what happens at our clients every month once the module is installed:
When someone is hired. The HR team creates the new employee's record in Odoo. The next day, the payroll administrator sees them appear in their software, without having entered anything.
When an employee takes leave. It is approved in Odoo. It automatically flows up to the payroll administrator so that the payslip takes it into account.
When a bonus or overtime is granted. HR records it in Odoo. The payroll administrator finds it on the right payslip, with no phone calls, no emails, no Excel.
When payroll is done. All the accounting entries (salaries, charges, contributions) come back automatically into Odoo, in the right place. The accountant has nothing left to re-enter.
The result? No more double entry. No more Excel files emailed on the 25th of the month. No more errors between payroll and accounting. And concretely, one to two working days saved every month.
What information passes automatically from Odoo to payroll?
This is often when the question becomes concrete: "But what exactly gets passed?" Here, in plain terms, is everything the module transmits automatically.
On each employee's record:
- Their identity and title (Mr or Ms)
- Their marital status: single, married, divorced, widowed, cohabiting
- Their employee number, taken from Odoo's internal badge
- Their contact details and personal information needed for payroll
On the employment contract:
- The contract type: permanent (CDI), fixed-term (CDD), temporary agency contract, apprenticeship contract, professionalization contract
- The reference salary
- Working time (number of weekly or monthly hours)
- Professional status (executive, non-executive...)
- The applicable pension scheme
On absences, each type of leave entered in Odoo is transmitted with its corresponding payroll code:
- Paid leave
- Sick leave
- RTT (working time reduction days)
- Unpaid leave
- Maternity and paternity leave
- Workplace accident
And for rarer absences or those specific to your collective agreement, new codes can be added in a few clicks, without touching the payroll software's configuration.
On the month's variable items, that is, what changes from one month to the next on the payslip:
- Standard overtime
- Overtime at a 25% premium
- Overtime at a 50% premium
- Seniority bonus
- 13th-month pay
- Paid leave allowance
- Meal vouchers
- Transport allowance
- Variable compensation: sales commissions, target-based bonuses, performance bonuses, exceptional bonuses. This is typically the case of a sales team where each salesperson earns a percentage of their sales: Odoo already knows the invoiced sales per salesperson, calculates the commission according to the defined rule, and automatically transmits it to payroll at month-end. No more Excel sheet to rebuild every month to calculate variables.
Here again, this list grows on request: mileage allowance, benefit in kind, meal allowance, year-end bonus... Anything that must appear on the payslip can be added to the list of information flowing automatically between Odoo and payroll.
And in the other direction, back from payroll, the monthly accounting entry comes back into Odoo on its own: gross salaries, net salaries, social charges, employer and employee contributions — everything is recorded in the right journal, in the right company, with no human intervention.
What if you have several companies?
This is where our solution shows its full value. Many of our clients are groups: a parent company, two or three subsidiaries, sometimes more.
The module was designed from the start to handle this case. Each company has:
- Its own account with the payroll provider.
- Its own rules if they differ.
- Its own accounting.
Everything stays compartmentalized, as the law requires. No risk of mixing between entities. The group director manages everything from a single Odoo, but each company keeps its full autonomy.
Why OpenPaye, and not another payroll software?
The French payroll market has several serious players: Silae, Sage Paie, Cegid Paie, ADP, PayFit, Nibelis. Each has its strengths, its target customers, its history.
At ANOR, we deliberately chose OpenPaye for three reasons.
The quality of the technical architecture. OpenPaye is software designed for the cloud from the start, with a genuine, well-designed modern API. That may sound technical, but the impact is very concrete: it is precisely what allows us to exchange data reliably, in real time, in both directions, with Odoo. Many software products on the market, inherited from older architectures, simply do not allow this level of integration.
The rigor of the payroll engine. Under the hood, OpenPaye is solid software: a rigorous payroll engine, regular updates of collective agreements by the vendor's teams, fine-grained multi-establishment management, operation traceability. For a technical partner like ANOR, which must guarantee to its clients that payroll runs smoothly every month, this is essential.
A dynamic product team. The interface evolves, grows richer and improves version after version. The vendor invests in user experience, and the software does not rest on its laurels. We see the tool progress from version to version at our clients.
Our conviction: in this market, what makes the difference in the long run is the quality of the technical foundation. Other criteria can be made up for. An aging architecture, much less so.
A module designed, developed and deployed by ANOR
The connector between Odoo and OpenPaye is an in-house development by ANOR. And ANOR takes care of everything, from start to finish:
- ANOR designs, develops and maintains the module. The whole technical team, the whole roadmap, all the enhancements are at ANOR.
- ANOR deploys it at the client, configures it and trains the teams. Installation, configuration of rules specific to your business, training of HR and accounting users: everything is done by the same team that wrote the code.
In practice, this means you benefit from a module that is:
- Designed specifically for the needs of the French market, taking into account collective agreements, absence codes, multi-company setups and local accounting constraints.
- Maintained on the latest Odoo versions. When Odoo releases a new version, the module follows. You don't end up stuck a year later, unable to move forward.
- Adaptable to your business rules: a new type of bonus, a new absence code, a new commission rule, a new legal entity to connect. ANOR adjusts, ANOR deploys.
- Reliable day to day. The module has a synchronization log that traces every exchange. If something doesn't go through, we see it within minutes and fix it.
- No dependence on a third-party vendor: you know who develops, who maintains, who answers. No black box, no intermediary, a single point of contact across the whole chain — from source code to training your teams.
It is this vertical integration — a single provider mastering development, deployment and training — that makes it possible to offer a complete, reliable and lasting solution, where most connectors on the market are single-company, generic, or abandoned at the first Odoo version upgrade.
In summary
If you have chosen Odoo and are wondering what to do about payroll, here is our advice in one sentence: keep Odoo to run your business, entrust payroll to a specialist, and make them talk to each other.
It is simpler, safer, and saves you time every month.
Want to discuss it? We offer a first one-hour meeting to understand your situation and see whether this approach is right for you.
Get in touch.