Top 5 New Features in Odoo 20 for a More Connected Business

Explore what’s new in Odoo 20 and how these updates can benefit companies moving to Odoo.

Running a business today takes more than juggling separate apps for sales, projects, HR, and your website. Keeping things running smoothly means using one connected platform that simplifies daily tasks and cuts down friction for your team.

Odoo 20 continues to focus heavily on this, bringing together a multitude of useful business applications in a single setup. Some of the most interesting tools in the package are Sales, Projects, Planning, Timesheets, and the AI-powered Website Builder. Together, they help optimize day-to-day operations, give you complete visibility into what’s happening, and eliminate the headache of dealing with disconnected systems.

In this post, we’ll dive deeper into these five key areas and see how they can make life much easier for modern businesses.

1. Sales: Managing the Entire Sales Journey

Sales is still the beating heart of Odoo, but Odoo 20 packs in some awesome upgrades to make sales workflows way more flexible, automated, and straightforward.

The core sales process will feel totally familiar, but this release brings some great tweaks to commissions, pricing, quotes, sales orders, and invoicing.

Here are some of the standout new features in Odoo 20:

• Payment-based commissions: Calculate commissions based on cash actually collected from customers, with full support for manager overrides and split payouts.

• Easier invoicing and prepayments: Set fixed prepayment amounts, bill extra service hours, and mark orders fully invoiced in a snap.

• Slick new Sales dashboard: Catch an instant snapshot of your sales performance right from your quotation and order screens.

• More flexible order lines: Type out custom item descriptions without needing a predefined product, or turn on the new Mandatory Product setting if you want to require specific product picks.

• Supercharged quote templates: Build reusable quote sections, add optional add-ons, and pull items straight in from your product catalog.

• Smarter pricing rules: Handle recurring billing, package discounts, and fixed-price pricelists with ease.

• On-the-fly margin tweaks: Adjust profit margins and variant prices on the fly right inside sales orders.

• Handy integrations and shortcuts: Connect directly with Lazada marketplace and fulfill sales orders even without installing the full Inventory app.

All these updates make Odoo 20 Sales super adaptable to almost any business model, cutting down busywork and letting reps take full control over pricing, commissions, quotes, and billing.

2. Project: Bringing Teams, Customers and Tasks Closer Together

Project management is rarely just about checking tasks off a list. In a real project, teams need to coordinate responsibilities, communicate with customers, keep deadlines under control, track time, and understand whether the work is progressing as expected.

Odoo Project has long brought many of these activities together in one place. With Odoo 20, the focus moves further towards collaboration and visibility, making it easier for both internal teams and external customers to stay connected to the work.

One of the most interesting improvements is the way project teams can be structured. Project members can now have specific roles, making it easier to understand who is involved in a project and what their responsibilities are. This can be particularly useful in larger projects where simply knowing who has access to a project isn't enough.

The customer side of project management has also become more flexible. Portal users can be assigned to tasks, while customers can collaborate on projects without necessarily having to become followers of every project or task. This creates a cleaner distinction between people who need to follow information and people who are actively collaborating on the work.

This is especially useful for service companies working directly with customers. Instead of relying on long email exchanges to discuss progress, customers can interact with the project through the portal and follow relevant task updates. Changes recorded in a task's chatter can also be made visible to portal users, helping keep communication connected to the work itself.

Odoo 20 also strengthens the connection between Sales and Project. Projects can now be created directly from opportunities, making the transition from winning a deal to delivering the associated work more seamless. Rather than treating sales and project delivery as separate processes, Odoo can connect the two stages of the customer journey.

For project managers, improvements to planning and reporting add another layer of visibility. Task schedules can be printed directly from the Gantt view, while project financial information is now handled through dedicated budget and margin reporting. This provides a clearer way to look beyond task completion and understand the financial side of a project.

And, as project work increasingly happens away from a desk, Odoo 20 also brings improvements to the mobile task experience, including a redesigned task header.

These changes may not completely redefine Odoo Project, but they reinforce an important direction: projects are becoming less about managing a list of tasks and more about connecting the people, customers, communication, planning and financial information surrounding those tasks.

If you're already using Odoo Project, expect a much smoother workflow. If you're looking into Odoo for the first time, it shows how Project can sit right at the core of your service delivery by bringing sales, client portals, timesheets, schedules, and financial tracking into one central place.

3. Planning: From Scheduling People to Coordinating Work

Getting project tasks set up is only half the battle. Once everything is planned out, you still have to make sure you've got the right people, gear, and hours lined up to execute.

That's where Odoo Planning comes into play.

In the past, Planning was mostly used to organize staff shifts, roles, and basic availability. In Odoo 20, Planning connects directly to the actual work, especially with the built-in integration for Field Service.

Instead of managing field jobs in a separate scheduling silo, Odoo brings field operations right into your shift and resource planning view. That means you can coordinate who's working, what task they're tackle, where they need to go, and what gear they'll need all at once.

The connection to Project is much tighter, too. In Odoo 20, shifts link straight to specific tasks, making it super clear who's assigned to complete each part of a job.

Planning is also way more flexible when multiple teammates or tools need to team up. You can assign multiple resources to a single shift, and set shift priorities so Odoo's Auto Plan feature knows what to schedule first.

If you have technicians traveling to client sites, you'll love the new Mapbox integration that displays estimated travel times right on the Gantt chart. That gives dispatchers full context so they can plan realistic days instead of guessing travel windows.

Resource management gets a boost as well. Employees can be assigned specific tools and equipment, which then automatically lock into their shift schedule. If your team relies on specialized gear or service vans, this simplifies scheduling massively.

Field Service brings another layer to this. Odoo 20 can take customer locations into account when automatically planning shifts, while businesses can also track customer equipment and intervention history, manage travel-related fees, and collect service requests through website forms.

This completely evolves what Planning does in Odoo. It's not just a basic staff calendar anymore; it's a smart control center connecting staff, tasks, locations, equipment, and customer requests.

Without a doubt, one of the coolest parts of Odoo 20 is how naturally planning ties right into getting the actual work done.

4. Timesheets: Painless and Smarter Time Tracking

Timesheets are essential for many service businesses. They influence customer billing, project costs, resource utilization and profitability. Yet they are also one of the processes employees most frequently delay or forget.

Odoo 20 introduces one of the most significant changes to Timesheets with the Timesheet Assistant.

Instead of relying entirely on employees remembering to start a timer or reconstruct their day later, the assistant can use activity information to suggest potential timesheet entries. Employees can then review, adjust and confirm those suggestions rather than creating every entry manually.

The assistant hooks up with ActivityWatch to track computer activity locally on your machine and generate smart suggestions. Privacy is built-in: your raw activity data stays local on your computer, so you get effortless time suggestions without giving managers a line-by-line view of every single click.

Odoo 20 also brings some great customization options to control how suggestions behave:

• Set minimum time triggers so quick tasks don't clutter your suggestions unless you spend a solid chunk of time on them.

• Configure Side Activities for brief distractions like checking a quick message without ruining your main activity timeline.

• Share Assistant rules with teammates, specific groups, or the whole company while keeping personal preferences private.

Another massive win is the Timesheets Revamp. Logging time isn't locked inside the Timesheets or Project app anymore—a quick timer icon in Odoo's top bar lets you start, stop, and log hours from whichever screen you're working on, making tracking super frictionless throughout your day.

Why is this a big deal?

Historically, timesheets relied on people remembering to fill in every hour accurately. Odoo 20 completely flips the script.

Instead of bugging employees to reconstruct their week on Friday afternoon, Odoo gives them a pre-filled draft to confirm or tweak in seconds.

If your company relies on logged hours for client billing, project costs, or profitability checks, this update will boost both timesheet accuracy and project visibility big time.

The takeaway is clear: Odoo 20 turns timesheets from an annoying chore into a smart, automated assistant built right into your daily routine.

5. Website AI Builder: Build Stunning Websites with Simple Prompts

With Odoo 20, AI becomes a super practical co-pilot for building and managing the website. The standout feature is the AI Website Assistant, which embeds AI right inside the website editor so the user can edit pages or build new sections using simple voice commands or text prompts.

Rather than navigating through nested options, building blocks, and technical settings, users can simply instruct the assistant on their desired adjustments or new content. The assistant is capable of drafting pages, refining web forms, and restructuring site menus efficiently.

Furthermore, it utilizes the data already stored within the Odoo database. During page creation, it can draw inspiration from other websites or automatically populate information using the existing product catalogs or event listings.

Within seconds, a complete, customized page is generated according to your specified requirements:

This feature provides assistance to businesses looking to launch or refresh their web presence without having to code every single page from scratch.

Here's how AI-assisted web design helps out:

• Drafting engaging web copy instantly

• Laying out initial page structures in seconds

• Brainstorming fresh ideas for new page sections

• Getting new site builds off the ground much faster

• Customizing page content with minimal effort

Instead of spending too much time creating a draft from scratch, teams can let the AI generate a solid draft and then polish it up to match the brand and audience perfectly.

The best part? AI doesn't replace web design, it just speeds up the heavy lifting significantly.

Odoo 20 completely changes how people build web pages. Users aren't tied strictly to menus, buttons, and snippet blocks anymore. For small teams, marketers, or non-technical business owners, it makes building an awesome website accessible to everyone.

And for experienced developers, it offers a faster way to prototype and test new layout ideas.

Conclusion

Odoo 20 continues to strengthen the platform by making its applications more connected, more automated and easier to use across everyday business processes.

The new features in Sales, Project, Planning, Timesheets and Website show a clear direction: reduce manual work, improve visibility and help users work more efficiently across a single integrated system.

However, getting value from a new Odoo version is not simply about activating new features. The real opportunity comes from understanding which changes are relevant to your business, how they fit into your existing processes, and where they can help simplify or improve the way your teams work. This is where having an experienced Odoo implementation partner can make a significant difference.

At ERPGAP, we help companies assess these opportunities, adapt Odoo to their needs and get more value from their implementation, whether through a new project, an upgrade or a migration to Odoo 20.

Odoo 20 brings new possibilities. The key is knowing how to turn them into measurable improvements for your business.