A free audit usually means one of two things: a thin demo followed by a hard pitch, or a discovery call where you talk for thirty minutes and then receive a proposal you could have written yourself. We understand the hesitation. When we put a free 30-minute ERP audit on our site, we knew the word free would raise more eyebrows than it lowered.
So here is the whole thing, demystified — the agenda we follow, the document you walk away with, and the outcomes we consider a success, including the one where we tell you not to hire us.
The agenda — three questions, thirty minutes
We do not screen-share a demo. Odoo demos are easy to find and they all look great; a demo tells you nothing about whether the system fits your operation. Instead we work through three questions, in order.
- What runs your business today? The current stack — the accounting tool, the spreadsheets, the messaging thread that is secretly your purchasing system. We map what actually exists, including the parts nobody likes to admit to.
- Where does it hurt? Not a feature wishlist. We are after the two or three moments each month where work stalls, numbers disagree between systems, or someone re-types data from one screen into another.
- What shape is your data in? How many products, partners, open invoices, years of history — and whether all of that lives in exportable systems or in a drawer of files. This question quietly decides most of the migration effort, so we ask it early.
Thirty minutes is enough because we are not trying to design your system on the call. We are trying to understand it well enough to scope it honestly. When we need a second look at something — a sample export, a chart of accounts — we ask for it afterward rather than padding the meeting.
What you leave with
Within a few days you receive a written scope: which processes we would cover, which standard Odoo Community or OCA modules already cover them — we build custom only where standard genuinely falls short, and anything we do build ships as proper versioned modules in Git, not patches buried in your database — the migration approach we would take, and a fixed price. Fixed means fixed. Because we scope before we quote, the number does not drift once work starts; surprises in month three are usually the receipt for a quote issued in week one without this step.
That document is yours. Take it to another integrator, use it to compare offers, or file it for next year. This is deliberate: an audit that only produces leverage for the vendor is not an audit, it is a funnel. A scope you can take anywhere keeps us honest about what goes in it.
The honest outcomes
An audit ends one of three ways. Sometimes the fit is clear and we propose a project — with the migration plan spelled out up front, including reconciliation reports that prove your balances survived the move, dry-runs on your real data, and a rollback plan before anything touches production. Sometimes the timing is wrong — the data is not ready, the team is mid-crisis, a decision is pending — and the most useful output is a short list of what to fix before an ERP makes sense. And sometimes Odoo is not the right fit. A two-person operation living happily in a spreadsheet does not need an ERP yet. A company whose core process depends on a specialized vertical tool that Odoo would only poorly imitate should keep the vertical tool. In those cases we say so, in writing, and the conversation ends there — no follow-up sequence, no quarterly check-in emails.
Why free, then? Because scoping is where ERP projects are won or lost, and we would rather do it carefully before money changes hands than badly after. Every fixed-price quote we issue rests on that half hour, so the audit is not a favor — it is the first step of our own process, and we would be doing it anyway. It also filters in both directions: you learn whether we know our craft, and we learn whether this is a project we can stand behind all the way through — go-live, role-based training for each team, restore-tested backups rather than backups we merely hope work, upgrade-testing before any version move, and support under a real tiered SLA instead of a mailbox.
If you have been circling the button, this is what is behind it: three questions, a written scope, and a straight answer. The rest of what happens after — how we run migrations, what upgrade-testing involves, what each support tier actually promises — is documented on our implementation services page, and we are glad to walk through any of it on the call.