This module has been started by lazy accounting users who hate enter they vendor bills manually in Odoo. Almost all companies have several vendor bills to enter regularly in the system from the same vendors: phone bill, electricity bill, Internet access, train tickets, etc. Most of these invoices are available as PDF. If we are able to automatically extract from the PDF the required information to enter the invoice as vendor bill in Odoo, then this module will create it automatically. To know the full story behind the development of this module, read this blog post.
In order to reliably extract the required information from the invoice, two international standards exists to describe an Invoice in XML:
- CII (Cross-Industry Invoice) developped by UN/CEFACT (United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business),
- UBL (Universal Business Language) which is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 19845) developped by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards).
Some e-invoice standards such as Factur-X propose to embed the XML description of the invoice inside the PDF invoice. Other people think that the futur is pure-XML invoices: a European initiative called PEPPOL aims at setting up an open network to exchange e-invoices as UBL XML. We don't know yet which standard and which practice will prevail on electronic invoicing in the future, but we hope that lazy accountants won't have to manually encode their vendor bills in the near future. This module is here to help achieve this goal!
This module doesn't do anything useful by itself ; it requires other modules to work: each modules adds a specific invoice format.
Here is how the module works:
- the user starts a wizard and uploads the PDF or XML invoice,
- if it is an XML file, Odoo will parse it to create the invoice (requires additional modules for specific XML formats, such as the module account_invoice_import_ubl for the UBL format),
- if it is a PDF file with an embedded XML file in Factur-X/CII format, Odoo will extract the embedded XML file and parse it to create the invoice (requires the module account_invoice_import_facturx),
- otherwise, Odoo will use the invoice2data Python library to try to interpret the text of the PDF (requires the module account_invoice_import_invoice2data),
- if there is already some draft supplier invoice for this supplier, Odoo will propose to select one to update or create a new draft invoice,
- otherwise, Odoo will directly create a new draft supplier invoice and attach the PDF to it.
This module also works with supplier refunds.
Table of contents
Go to the form view of the suppliers and configure it with the following parameters:
- Individual/Company: Company
- the VAT Number (this field is used by default when searching the supplier in the Odoo partner database)
- in the Accounting tab, create one or several Invoice Import Configurations.
You can configure a mail gateway to import invoices from an email:
- Go to the menu Settings > Technical > Email > Incoming Mail Servers and setup the access (POP or IMAP) to the mailbox that will be used to receive the invoices,
- In the section Actions to perform on incoming mails, set the field Create a new record to Wizard to import supplier invoices/refunds (model account.invoice.import).
- If you are in a multi-company setup, you also have to go to the menu Invoicing > Configuration > Settings: in the section Invoice Import, enter the email of the mailbox used to import invoices in the field Mail Gateway: Destination E-mail (it will be used to import the invoice in the proper company).
- The bank accounts of the suppliers can be automatically populated from data received from invoice files. For security reasons this has to be activated seperatly: Go to the menu Settings > Invoicing and select "Auto-create Bank Account of Supplier".
Go to the menu Invoicing > Vendors > Import Vendor Bill and follow the instructions of the wizard. You can also start the wizard from the Accounting Dashboard: on the purchase journal, click on the Upload button.
This module also supports the scenario where you have a draft vendor bill (generated from a purchase order for instance) and you have to update it to comply with the real invoice sent by the vendor: on the form view of the draft vendor bill, click on the button Import Invoice File and follow the instructions of the wizard.
If you have a large volume of invoices to import, you may be interested by the script mass_invoice_import.py which is available in the scripts subdirectory of this module. If you run:
./mass_invoice_import.py --help
you will have detailed instructions on how to use the script.
A particular use case of this script is to have a directory where all the invoices saved are automatically uploaded in Odoo. For that, have a look at the sample script inotify-sample.sh available in the same subdirectory. Edit this sample script to adapt it to your needs.
- Remove dependency on base_iban and develop a separate glue module between this module and base_iban
Bugs are tracked on GitHub Issues. In case of trouble, please check there if your issue has already been reported. If you spotted it first, help us to smash it by providing a detailed and welcomed feedback.
Do not contact contributors directly about support or help with technical issues.
- Akretion
- Alexis de Lattre <[email protected]>
- Andrea Stirpe <[email protected]>
- Nicolas JEUDY <https://github.com/njeudy>
- Yannick Vaucher <[email protected]>
- Ronald Portier <[email protected]>
- Simone Orsi <[email protected]>
This module is maintained by the OCA.
OCA, or the Odoo Community Association, is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of Odoo features and promote its widespread use.
Current maintainer:
This module is part of the OCA/edi project on GitHub.
You are welcome to contribute. To learn how please visit https://odoo-community.org/page/Contribute.