Odoo for Coworking
Odoo rollouts for coworking and serviced office operators
Coworking floors, serviced offices and managed workspace. Desk and room inventory, plans with credits, company accounts, and one monthly invoice per payer.
Coworking operators run a property business with a subscription business bolted on, and the two are usually kept in different files. The desk list is a spreadsheet, the rooms are in a shared calendar, and the month end is a person rebuilding invoices from both. An Odoo rollout here is about making the space itself a set of records with rates on them, and then letting the billing run read from what actually happened in the building.
Where it hurts today
The desk list is a spreadsheet
Who sits where, on which plan, at what price, and when their notice period starts. It is maintained by one person, it is wrong within a fortnight, and renewals are missed because nothing prompts anybody.
Meeting rooms clash
A shared calendar has no concept of turnaround between bookings, no seat limit and no member credits. Two bookings land on one room, a member walks into a room being reset, and the operator apologises rather than charges.
Credits and allowances are settled by argument
Meeting room hours, printing and guest passes are included up to a point that nobody can evidence at month end. The overage is either waived to keep the peace or invoiced and then credited.
The monthly invoice is rebuilt by hand
Plan fees, room overage, printing, parking, lockers, mail handling and day passes are keyed per account. Company accounts covering several members are the worst of it, and something is always billed twice or not at all.
Nobody can say who is in the building
Access cards are issued and rarely revoked, the head count at the front desk is a guess, and mail and address clients are logged in a notebook. There is no record of which identity document was seen for which company, or when it expires.
The modules that carry the load
Each one is here for a reason specific to coworking, not because it appears on a standard module list.
- ๐ Odoo Subscriptions
Plans as recurring contracts with a term and a notice period, so renewals and price changes happen on schedule rather than when somebody remembers.
- ๐ Odoo Appointments
Room and desk booking with capacity, opening hours and a turnaround gap, which is what a shared calendar cannot enforce.
- ๐งพ Odoo POS (Point of Sale)
Day passes, coffee, printing top-ups and walk-in sales at the front desk, on the member or company account where they belong.
- ๐ผ Odoo Accounting
One invoice per payer at period end, gathering plan fees, overage and add-ons, with every source record stamped so nothing is billed twice.
- โ๏ธ Odoo Sign
Membership agreements and address service paperwork signed and stored against the account, with the identity documents held in the same place.
- ๐๏ธ Odoo Helpdesk
Member requests and building faults as tickets with an owner and a response time, instead of a message to the community manager phone.
- ๐ Odoo Website
Self-serve booking, credit balances and day pass purchase, so the front desk stops being the booking system.
How the rollout runs
- 1 Inventory the space
Every desk bank, private office, phone booth, meeting room and event space as a record with seats, rate, minimum booking, opening hours and turnaround. Tedious, unavoidable, and the phase that makes every later phase possible.
- 2 Members, plans and company accounts
Plans with their credits and allowances, then members migrated with start dates, notice periods, payer and card numbers. Company accounts are modelled here so one payer can carry several members from day one.
- 3 The billing run
Credits consumed before money, overage priced at the plan rate, add-ons and day passes gathered, one invoice per payer, allowances reset. Run in parallel with the manual invoice for one month, line by line, until they match.
- 4 Access, occupancy and the address service
Check-in and check-out for live occupancy, access card issue and revocation, mail logging, and the registered address records with their identity documents and expiry dates.
What to have ready before kickoff
Projects that slip usually slip here, not in the build. Bring these to the first workshop.
- โ A floor plan with every seat and room named as staff refer to them, plus the rate and capacity of each.
- โ The plan list with what each one includes: meeting room credits, printing allowance, guest passes and access hours.
- โ The current member list with payer, start date, notice period, desk assigned and access card number.
- โ The add-on price list: parking, lockers, mail handling, printing overage and event space hire.
- โ The access control system make and model, and whether cards can be issued and revoked through an API.
- โ The mail and registered address client list, with which identity documents are on file and when each expires.
Where it connects
Systems we most often connect on coworking projects. The full list is on the integrations page.
Coworking Spaces
For the feature view of desks, rooms, membership plans, credits and occupancy, read the solution page.
Open the Coworking Spaces solutionQuestions we get asked
Can one company pay for several members on a single invoice? +
Yes, and it is the normal case once an operator has any corporate clients. Members sit under a company account, each keeps their own record, credits and access, and the billing run raises one invoice to the company with the member detail behind it.
How are meeting room credits and overage handled? +
Credits are consumed first and only then does a booking start costing money, at the overage rate on the plan. Cancellations inside the window are charged at the percentage you set, because the room sat empty either way. All of it lands on the same monthly invoice.
Can it drive our access control system? +
Where the vendor exposes an API, cards can be issued and revoked from the member record, and check-in gives a live head count per building. Where it does not, we sync a card list on a schedule instead. We confirm which one applies during discovery rather than assuming.
Does it cover mail handling and registered address clients? +
Yes. The address service is its own record against a legal entity, with the identity documents seen, who saw them and when they expire, and every letter or parcel logged against the company it was addressed to with who collected it. Requirements for that service differ by country, so we scope those with you rather than assuming them.
How long does a rollout take for a single building? +
A single building typically runs in a 6 to 10 week band, including one parallel billing month. Multi-building operators add configuration time per site but reuse the plan catalogue and the billing run, so the second building is materially faster than the first.