Odoo and Saga: how to run production and inventory without changing your accountant

In almost every conversation with a manufacturing or distribution company in Romania, sooner or later we get to the same question: “If we bring in Odoo, what happens to our accountant? She works in Saga and doesn’t want to change it.”

The short answer: you don’t have to change your accountant or her software.

The setup we recommend to most small and medium companies is simple: all operations move to Odoo (quotes, orders, purchasing, warehouse, production and invoicing), while financial accounting and the returns to ANAF, the Romanian tax authority, stay in Saga. Data goes from Odoo to Saga through import files, so nobody types the invoices in twice.

Below you can see exactly how the work is split between the two programs, how data moves between them and what the connection costs.

Where it gets stuck: Saga is built for ANAF, not for the shop floor

Saga is the most widely used accounting software in Romania for a very good reason: it is cheap, stable, updated quickly with every change to the Tax Code, and almost every accountant knows how to use it.

The problem starts when you try to run a factory or a warehouse with software designed for balance sheets and tax returns.

Accounting looks backwards: it records documents after things have happened, often weeks later, when the paperwork reaches the office. As an owner or production manager, you need to see what is happening today:

• How much raw material is on the shelf right now, not how much there was on the 25th of last month, when the stock was closed.
• What stage a customer’s order is at and which machine it is stuck on.
• How much material a batch actually used, compared with the recipe.
• What a product really costs to make, before you send the customer a quote.

When you try to keep all of this in Saga plus ten spreadsheets on the side, operators end up writing on paper, someone in the office types the sheets into a computer, and the accountant enters them once more at the end of the month.

How we split the work between Odoo and Saga

Instead of forcing your accountant to learn an international ERP, or you to run production from Excel, we let each program do what it does best.

How data gets from Odoo to Saga, without double work

Saga imports incoming and outgoing invoices, receipts, payments, customers, suppliers and items from XML files. Both options below rely on this import. Which one fits depends on your volume of documents and on how your accounting is done (in-house or outsourced).

Option 1: periodic export from Odoo (the standard option). The company works in Odoo all month: it receives goods, produces, consumes materials and issues invoices. At the end of the week or month, Odoo generates the files in exactly the format Saga expects. The accountant imports them in a few minutes, checks the accounts and closes the month.

For most small and medium factories with an external accountant, this is the safest and cheapest option. The accountant keeps control before the data reaches the trial balance, but no longer types in hundreds of invoices by hand.

Option 2: automatic export (for high volumes or in-house accounting). Odoo generates the files automatically as documents are validated, with the Romanian accounts already filled in (301, 345, 371, 401, 4111, 701 and so on), and puts them in a shared folder. The accountant no longer downloads anything: she opens the import in Saga and takes in everything that has built up.

How the stock in Odoo matches the stock in Saga

An accountant’s biggest fear when hearing about a new ERP is the stock write-off: “How will I know in Saga how much raw material was used and how many finished goods were made?”

In a manufacturing company, this is where you save the most time.

In Odoo, when shop floor operators finish a manufacturing order, the system knows exactly which raw materials were used (accounts 301 and 302) and which finished goods came out (account 345), at their real cost, calculated FIFO or by weighted average cost.

The accountant no longer sits with a stack of recipes to create consumption notes in Saga. At the end of the month, Odoo gives her the consumption and production totals by account, already calculated, which she records in Saga as a single journal entry instead of dozens of consumption notes.

If there is an inventory difference or a question during an audit, the detail by batch, lot, date and operator stays in Odoo, two clicks away.

What the Odoo and Saga integration costs

Because we do both Odoo implementation and custom software and integrations, we build the connection around the way your accountant works, not around a rigid template.

Connecting to Saga is a small part of the total implementation budget, which we covered in detail in How much does an ERP cost for a factory in Romania. It pays for itself through the hours your people no longer spend copying invoices, goods receipts and consumption notes from one program to another.

What matters is involving your accountant from the analysis stage. A 30-minute conversation between us and your accountant before configuration saves weeks of adjustments later. When an accountant sees that we are not changing her software, and that instead of bags of invoices and unclear spreadsheets she gets a clean file she imports in a few minutes, she has every reason to support the project.