The improvements you already paid for and never switched on

Odoo 20 is unveiled on 24 September. The interesting question is not what it brings — it is why you probably do not have what Odoo delivered to you back in January.

You have done this at some point this year. You read somewhere that Odoo already does something — reconcile automatically, predict the lines of an invoice — you go looking for it on your screen, and it is not there.

You are not imagining it. You simply do not have it. And the reason is more uncomfortable than a mistake on your part: it is an improvement already paid for inside your subscription that never reached your company.

Four times faster

If you ask yourself how often a new version of Odoo comes out, the answer in your head is "one a year, in autumn". That was true until recently. This is the 2026 release record:

Four rounds of improvements in seven months. One every two months. And on top of that, on 24 September, Odoo's founder unveils version 20 in the opening keynote of their annual conference in Brussels.

That is the real change of 2026, and it has nothing to do with artificial intelligence: the rate at which your management tool improves has multiplied by four.

Now the uncomfortable question. Of those four rounds, how many are running in your company today?

If you cannot answer, it is not your fault. It is the symptom.

What Odoo already delivered to you (and these are not promises)

Everything below is published, documented and available, and has been for months. I will skip the small additions and go to the ones that take days of work a month off an administration department:

In May, an assistant became able to create and modify records — you can ask it to by uploading a PDF with the instructions. Manual reconciliation stopped being limited to bank accounts and opened up to any account in the general ledger. And supplier payments from Odoo with a single signature appeared.

In July, accounting started predicting the lines of an invoice — product, account, tax, analytic — and the automatic reconciliation button arrived. On top of that, Odoo can connect to external AI tools through a standard protocol, accept requests dictated by voice, and choose the most suitable model for each task on its own.

Read those first four again: reconciliation on any account, supplier payments with one signature, invoice line prediction, automatic reconciliation. Published between May and July.

Are they switched on in your company?

The detail that explains everything

Here is the part almost nobody mentions, and it is in Odoo's own supported-versions documentation: those intermediate releases are exclusive to Odoo Online, the version they host themselves.

Translated:

• If your Odoo is on Odoo Online, you have been receiving all of this every two months, even if you had not noticed.
• If it is on your own server, or hosted by your provider, or on Odoo's most advanced hosting tier, you have received none of it. You are where you were: you jump from major version to major version.

Read that again, because it is counter-intuitive: there are customers paying for the most advanced hosting tier who are further behind on features than someone paying for the simplest one.

It is nobody's trap. It is a consequence of how the product is distributed. But it explains why the improvements you pay for do not appear on your screen.

So what is Odoo 20

With that in hand, version 20 makes much more sense.

For anyone on Odoo Online it will be a short step: they have spent months receiving, drip by drip, almost everything that is going to be presented.

For everybody else — most mid-sized Spanish companies — Odoo 20 is January, March, May and July all at once. And that really is a jump.

Of what Odoo has put in writing in the programme of their own conference, signed by their own people, what matters most to anyone looking at administration and finance: accounting on autopilot — accruals, loans, fixed assets, account predictions to speed up reconciliations; an accounting assistant that searches, summarises and analyses what is in your database; group consolidation with intercompany eliminations; electronic invoicing with a verified-identity inbox; and offline mode, the only feature they have explicitly labelled as "version 20".

Their thesis, in one line of their own: instead of handing raw data to a generic AI, put specialised competences inside the ERP.

A note of honesty: the founder's two keynotes publish no description. The headline announcement is not in the programme, so nobody knows — and anyone who says they know is speculating.

Three things with a financial consequence that you will not read anywhere else

We have read what ten consultancies have published about this version. None of the ten mentions what comes next, and it is the only thing in this whole text that can cost you money this year.

One. Version 17 goes out of support right about now. Odoo maintains the three most recent versions. With 20 out, the covered ones become 20, 19 and 18. Their own table puts the end of support for 17 in September 2026 — that is, these very days. If you are on 17 or below, from this month you are outside.

Two. Being outside has a price, and it is in the contract you already signed. The Enterprise subscription contract, in its pricing clause, sets a surcharge of 25 % of the annualised amount if your version is older than the three covered ones — calculated on your price per user and your number of users, charged once a year, and not before six months have passed since the new version was published. It is not a surprise and it is not a manoeuvre: it is public and you probably accepted it when you signed. But it is worth knowing, because it changes the arithmetic: standing still is not the free option. It is the option with a 25 % surcharge and a date on it.

Three. Upgrading to Odoo 20 will not just be upgrading Odoo. In the public code of the next version, the minimum requirements have gone up: PostgreSQL 16 — 19 asked for 13 — and Python 3.12 — it asked for 3.10. They have been fixed there for eleven months. If your Odoo runs on your own server on a system from a few years back, the database has to be migrated first. This is not upgrading an application: it is touching the layer underneath. It is perfectly doable, but it is a project — and if nobody has told you, your upgrade budget is incomplete.

And one for free, in the other direction: nine of those ten consultancies promise predictive financial forecasting in Odoo 20. It appears in no Odoo source. If you are waiting for that, better to know before you build a plan on top of it.

Nobody decides to fall behind

Here is the point everything above was heading towards.

When one version came out a year, a provider that takes three weeks per change was a bearable inconvenience. When improvements come out every two months, that same provider becomes the reason your company falls behind — without anyone ever having decided to fall behind.

Because there is no meeting where somebody decides not to use automatic reconciliation. It simply never reaches the top of the list. The pace quadrupled; the capacity to absorb it did not. And in that gap a quiet distance opens up that appears on no invoice.

We are Nodu, an Odoo agency, and we come from exactly there. We are a spin-off of AiKit Research, an artificial intelligence lab, and we have spent two years using Odoo to run our own processes with our own AI systems working inside it. In our house, bank reconciliation stopped being the task that eats the most hours of the month, payroll and time tracking are a button, the CRM is always complete without any salesperson filling in a form, and meetings turn themselves into written decisions. When we wanted something Odoo did not bring, we built it. We stopped working with our accounting firm — which was a very good one — because we run our own accounts inside our own Odoo, with AI and with the controls needed to sleep at night. We tell it in full in The invisible list.

We work differently: fixed, published prices instead of buckets of hours, the repetitive part done by supervised agents instead of by billed hours. And against the very problem of this article — the provider that takes three weeks — a commitment with a number on it: a reply within 4 working hours and a minor adjustment delivered within 48 h of the request becoming active. It is published on the site, not in a proposal. And we start easy: everything is delivered first on a clone of your ERP, on our machines, so your installation is not touched while you check whether the change is worth it to you.

What you can do this week, at no cost

It is called a health check of your Odoo and it is free. Four concrete answers:

1. Which version you are on, and whether it is still supported.
2. Which improvements from this year's four rounds you are missing, and which of them would take hours off your team.
3. Whether the 25 % surcharge in your contract applies to you, and from what date.
4. What it would technically take to move — including the database part nobody usually mentions.

And if what comes out of it is that you are fine as you are, we will be the ones to say so. It is free on purpose, precisely so we can tell you not to move if it does not suit you.

You do not need to change provider, or migrate anything, or decide anything today. Just to know what you are paying for and how much of it you have switched on — before everybody starts talking about Odoo 20 on the 24th. Ask for it here.