Understanding the overall purchasing process

Tip

Let's begin with a 30,000 foot view of the purchasing process. Putting together a purchasing system requires several steps, and initially, it can be confusing for people new to ERP systems. However, when you break the steps down and look at them individually, the process becomes much easier to understand.

Setting up a supplier

When you set up a supplier, you are determining the individuals or companies that are providing you with products. Sometimes suppliers are also referred to as vendors. In Odoo, it is perfectly possible to create a product and sell it without implementing a purchasing system. However, to begin using your system for purchasing, you will need to configure the suppliers.

The steps you take for setting up a supplier are much the same as setting up a customer. In fact, now is as good a time as any to tell you that Odoo maintains core customer, employee, and supplier records all in the same model (or table) named res.partner...