Odoo Portal Users Holidays Management
Customer Need
The customer, a consulting company, had a requirement to efficiently manage holiday requests and allocations for its employees. While the company maintained employee records within their existing Odoo system, most employees were registered without licenses, limiting their access solely as internal users. Due to cost considerations, licensing all employees to use Odoo’s native features was not economically viable. Specifically, the standard Odoo holidays module required full licensing of every employee, making it impractical and financially burdensome.
Proposed Solution
In response to these constraints, the project team proposed an innovative solution leveraging Odoo’s portal user capabilities. Odoo, by default, offers a holidays module intended for licensed internal users, enabling comprehensive management of time-off allocations and requests. The team suggested developing a customized module extending these functionalities to include portal users, thus facilitating access without needing licenses for each employee.
This custom solution allowed portal users—employees without internal licenses—to effectively interact with Odoo’s native holiday management entities. This approach provided essential functionalities such as viewing holiday information, submitting time-off requests, and managing holiday allocations, all accessible via the portal. Licensed access was selectively reserved for human resources managers, who managed, approved, and reviewed holiday requests and allocations comprehensively.
Development
To implement the proposed solution, a custom Odoo module was developed, extending portal user functionalities to integrate seamlessly with native holiday management features. This module introduced multiple portal views:
- Holidays Calendar: A visual interface presenting a calendar layout displaying all approved and recorded time-off entries specific to the logged-in employee.
- Holidays Current: A tabular representation listing current and pending time-off requests, detailing approved or awaiting approval periods that have not yet elapsed.
- Holidays Logs: A comprehensive view showing historical records of all past and current holiday-related entries for the employee.
- Time Off Request Form: An interactive form enabling portal users to request time-off. This form clearly displays the remaining holiday entitlement for the current and upcoming year and accommodates various holiday types, including paid holidays, unpaid holidays, sick leave, and birthday leave, indicating available days allocated per category.
A key part of this development was extending the standard link between employees and Odoo users. Typically, Odoo permits only internal licensed users to directly connect with employee records. The custom module expanded this link to include portal users, enabling them full access to relevant holiday management features.
Testing and Deployment
Following development, thorough testing was carried out collaboratively by the project team and client to ensure all functionalities performed seamlessly and met initial business requirements. Upon successful validation, the new module was deployed within the client’s existing Odoo.sh infrastructure, integrating smoothly with their current Odoo operations and facilitating immediate usage by portal users.
