[12.0]Question regarding to the future of sale order generation

[flotho]

Hi everyone,

I'm running on v12 and after the answer of @pedrobaeza here #189 (comment) I've tried to refactor the old module for v12 : https://github.com/MindAndGo/contract/tree/12.0-mig-sale-generation

Yet I'm struggling with the product_contract module. I clearly understand the answer of @sbejaoui here #504 and I'm comfortible with this process.

Yet, as the product_contract is creating new contracts and add lines in contracts, it create a kind of recursive strategy to create sale order from all the contract lines.... that would add a new line to the contract etc....

My goal is to be able to plan tasks and create project and analytic account at the start of the month and to be able to invoice it at the end of the month. This way I can follow time spent per project and inform my colleagues of the time available for each customer. It also help me to evaluate a workload each month. AFAIK, working with SO, project and task seems to still the best way to handle this.

So I would like to have your point of view about two options I'm thinking about :

• Continuing to work on sale_order_generation and find a way to work with product_contract that is really usefull
• Change the strategy and find another way to achieve the expected process without struggling with product_contract. (Of course your ideas are welcomed)

In advance, thanks for the time pent for reading and maybe answering.

Regards

[pedrobaeza]

For that goal, I'm not using sales orders, but https://github.com/OCA/contract/tree/12.0/contract_variable_qty_timesheet

[flotho]

Hi @pedrobaeza ,

AFAIU, this module do the job on invoicing part. but what about the planification process with tasks. Invoicing what has been done is a good thing but from time to time you only have recurring things to do (eg: 1h of community management or 1h of functional support) and even if you spent more time you'll only invoice one hour.
In this configuration employees must have somewhere a clear information of what is the limit and if there is a contract for a specific customer.
Did you ever faced this kind of process?

And thanks BTW

[pedrobaeza]

No, I'm not applying contracts to such things, as for us things like community management is not an extra. It's part of our core work 😉

For functional support, a little extra formula + a field at contract level does the trick.

[flotho]

Ok I understand how you work.
So you confirm that there is no other way to create tasks associated to contracts in this repo ?
Sale generation seems to still the appropriate path to work with ?

Regards

[pedrobaeza]

Not that I'm aware of.

[flotho]

Ok, great thanks @pedrobaeza

I'll clean up a little my process in my repo in order to deal with this process,

[pedrobaeza]

As a tip, I don't generate tasks for such things, but let customers generate tasks from their mail requests and an alias in the project. Then we decide to tag that tasks properly according the nature, and look for timesheets in tasks with that tag for the invoicing. Very straight-forward...

[flotho]

Yes, this is typically how I started to work, but the drawbacks I faced with this process are :

• you'll have only a single project per customer
• your employees are not easily awared of the "contract" signed with customer
• you finally observed "too late" the fact that the requests of your customer are out of contractual scope

We decided to work with generated tasks tagged as contract and for each new customer requests we're associating the request to the contracted one thanks to parent_id and sub task process. This way, each colleague can observe what is available as work quantity and many other good things.

[pedrobaeza]

I don't see that as drawbacks, as for me project = contract, and there's not too late for me, as a dashboard can tell you current status, but I agree is not using Odoo sale_timesheet "tools".

[flotho]

Improving the dashboard part is definitively a great part of the answer ! 👍