Odoo 20 bills every employee record. What changes for companies with crews in the field
With Odoo 20 the price list counts as a licence even the employees who never open Odoo. For a company with a few people in the office and many in the field, that is the line that weighs most. We read the Italian pricing page on 1 October 2026: here is what it says, and what we did about it.
Every employee record is a licence
Is considered as a light user, any user account indicated as active and designated as a “Light User” in the Software, or any active employee record (from the human resources App) not linked to an active non-portal user account.
In plain words: if a cleaner has a record in the Employees app and no user, they count as a Light User. That is €4.90 a month, and the licence is only available through an Odoo advisor.
A Light User can use the self-service features: time off, expenses, appraisals, attendance, planning, field service, the warehouse barcode scanner and read-only Knowledge. As an employee they get payslips and use the point of sale and the shop floor.
- €4.90
- a month for every employee record without a user
- €490
- a month with 100 people in the field
- €5,880
- a year, before a single office user
Connecting other software means the Custom plan
The Standard plan includes every app. Custom adds Studio, agentic AI, multi-company, the external API, Odoo.sh and on-premise. Installing Studio or adding a company switches you to Custom automatically.
At full price, billed yearly, Standard is €14.90 per user a month and Custom €27.90. The €13 difference applies to every user of the database, not only to whoever uses the integration.
The headline price lasts twelve months
The big numbers on the page, €11.90 and €22.90, are discounted: the discount lasts twelve months, for the users ordered at the start. From the second year, and for every user added later, you pay the list price. For a company planning beyond one year, that is where the maths starts.
These are the public Italian list prices, billed yearly. Running contracts and custom offers can differ: check yours.
What it means for a service company
A cleaning, facility or staffing company has the opposite shape to the one the licences are designed for: a few people working in Odoo all day, and many who never open it but still have to exist somewhere, with shifts, hours, contracts and pay stubs.
Under the Odoo 20 price list, keeping those people as Odoo employees costs €4.90 each a month. Keeping them outside Odoo, in a system built for them, removes that line.
That is what we do at Pulymax: the crews live in FogliOre, which keeps hours, shifts, leave and pay stubs; Odoo keeps customers, sales and invoices, with its office users.
There is a flip side, and it belongs here: FogliOre talks to Odoo through the external API, so the Odoo database has to be on Custom. If you are on Standard today, every office user costs €13 more a month. The calculation below includes it.
Do the maths
It pays off when people in the field far outnumber office users. With 80 people in the field and 5 office users on Standard, the difference is €3,924 a year, before FogliOre's price.
When it doesn't pay off
If you have few employees and almost all of them use Odoo every day, the Odoo 20 price list changes little for you, and moving people to another system makes no sense. The same goes if you connect nothing to Odoo, stay on Standard and keep no employee records.
If the first half of this article sounds like your company, tell us how you work: we will do the maths together, with your real numbers.
Sources
- Odoo pricing page, Italian version, read on 1 October 2026: odoo.com/it_IT/pricing-plan. Light User definition, plan prices, Custom plan features, first-year discount terms.