What a company on an ERP maintenance subscription receives each month
3 min readEquipo de Nodu
Odoo shipped four improvement releases between January and July 2026, and only installations hosted on Odoo Online received them. A company on Odoo.sh or on its own server jumps from major version to major version, so it does not have them. Among those improvements are bank reconciliation on any account and paying supplier invoices with a single signature, both published in May.
Most of those companies work with a maintenance supplier and do not know these functions exist. Not because the supplier is unaware of them, but because telling them is not part of what gets invoiced.
That is the difference between two ways of charging for the same work, and it determines what the customer receives each month.
What the hourly model produces
When work is billed by the hour, the supplier is paid for what the customer asks for. Spending time reviewing an installation and proposing improvements nobody requested is unbilled time, unless an audit project is opened, and that in turn has to be sold.
The result is not negligence: it is arithmetic. The customer receives exactly what they know how to ask for, and what they know how to ask for is limited by what they know about. Functions their ERP added two versions ago are not on that list, because nobody has shown them.
What a flat fee changes
With a monthly fee, the supplier is paid the same whether the customer asks for a lot or a little. The incentive inverts: revenue depends on the customer still being subscribed next month, and that depends on receiving something each month they had not asked for.
In practice, a customer's month has two halves. One is the request lane: ask for anything, one thing at a time, and it gets delivered. The other is a short list of things their business should be doing and isn't, put together by looking at their installation: what their Odoo version ships and they have not enabled, which processes are still done by hand, which obligation has a date. The customer approves or discards each line, and what they approve goes into the queue.
Where the list comes from
A monthly proposal is only useful if it comes from looking at the specific installation rather than from a catalogue. Three things feed it.
The first is Odoo's release notes, which publish what each release adds. Cross-referencing them with the customer's version and hosting produces a list of functions they have already paid for and do not have in place.
The second is obligations with dates. Veri*Factu is mandatory for companies on 1 January 2027 and for everyone else on 1 July of the same year. Odoo 17 goes out of support in September 2026, and staying below the three covered versions adds 25% a year to licence costs under the Enterprise agreement.
The third is repeated work visible in the data itself: processes that pass through an intermediate spreadsheet, reports rebuilt every month, reconciliations someone balances by hand.
What does not change
The customer still decides. A proposal is a proposal: they can say no to all of them and the request lane works the same.
And the work is done on a digital twin of the installation, not on the installation. What is proposed gets built separately, the customer sees it working, and only then is it moved.
To see which three things would come out of your company's first list, there is a thirty-second check that asks for no data.
Dates and percentages: Odoo release notes and supported-versions table, the Enterprise Subscription Agreement, and the Spanish Tax Agency's Veri*Factu calendar. Checked on 17 September 2026.