Moving from spreadsheets to Odoo: a data migration checklist

Spreadsheets are a reasonable way to run a young business, and a poor foundation once you have stock, staff and customers to keep track of. Moving to Odoo is mostly a data project. The software is the easy part. This checklist gives the order we recommend.

1. Decide what moves and what stays behind

Not everything needs to come across. List what you need on day one: customers, suppliers, products, prices, stock levels, open invoices and bills, opening balances. Leave behind anything you only keep out of habit. Old transactions can stay in an archive you can still open.

2. Audit what you have

Open each spreadsheet and ask:

• Who maintains it, and is there more than one version?
• Are the same customers or products spelled several ways?
• Are there blank cells, merged cells, notes in the wrong columns, totals typed by hand?
• Which numbers are trusted and which are guesses?

Write the problems down. This list becomes your cleaning plan.

3. Clean at the source

Fix the spreadsheet before you load it, not after. Remove duplicates, agree on one name per customer and product, give every product a code, and put one value in each cell. A clean file loads in minutes. A messy one creates problems you find weeks later.

4. Map columns to Odoo fields

For every column, write down where it goes in Odoo, or that it does not move. This mapping document is also how you explain later where a number came from. Decide early how you will handle things like units of measure, tax settings and currencies.

5. Do a trial load

Load a copy of your data into a test database, never the live one. Check a sample by hand: pick twenty customers, ten products and five invoices, and compare them with the spreadsheet. Fix the mapping and try again until the sample is right.

6. Reconcile the numbers

Totals must match, and the people who own those numbers should confirm them. Typical checks:

• Customer and supplier balances against the ledger
• Stock quantities and values against a count
• The trial balance before and after loading

Anything that does not match is explained and fixed, not rounded away.

7. Agree a cut-over plan

Pick a date, freeze changes in the old files, load the final data, run the checks once more, and decide in advance how you would roll back if something is wrong. Tell your team when the old spreadsheets stop being the source of truth.

8. Get a sign-off

A migration is finished when the person responsible for the numbers, usually finance, signs off the opening balances. Until then, it is not done.

After go-live

Keep the spreadsheets read-only for a while, and watch the first month-end closely. People will keep asking where a number came from, and your mapping document will answer them.

If you are planning a move like this and want a second pair of eyes on the plan, talk to us.