The cool stuff in Odoo 18

We've embedded the official Odoo SA launch video to the right (or below if you're on mobile), and you can check out the full release notes here, but here are what we feel the key areas are, and our thoughts on each:

• Performance improvements
  - It goes without saying that every version of Odoo generally improves performance. This time around it's not such a big number, but it's still there. If you're on Odoo 15 or older, it'll feel positively lightning fast!
  
  
• Read-only replica support in select areas of Odoo
  - This one is a bit nerdy, and it's not in the release notes, But we're really excited about this one. Basically you can start telling Odoo if it can look at a read-only replica instead of (by default) the primary read/write database. This has massive implications for website performance. We already have all production installations on our own hosting with at least 1 secondary copy, and in at least 1 case we have a customer making ODBC and PowerBI connections to their secondary/read-only copy to take reporting load off the primary.
  
  
• Passkey authentication support
  - Passkeys are a replacement for passwords that provide faster, easier, and more secure sign-ins to websites and apps across a user’s devices. Unlike passwords, passkeys are always strong and phishing-resistant. Our resident security expert (James) is happy to see this land!
  
  
• If you're on Odoo 16 or older you'll notice the UI improvements immediately. Odoo 18 builds on 17's UI improvements and takes them to the next level.
   - This one still is controversal, some love it, some hate it - we've come to love it, but maybe that's Stockholm Syndrome
  
  
• "Starts with" and "ends with" search operators are now available in the advanced search widget.
  - Although it was possible to do this already, it wasn't the easiest thing for non-developers to do. Its a bit of a shame this was proposed over 3 years ago and rejected, but at least we're here now! 
  
  
• A new project "Top Bar" adds customisable shortcuts from project task views to other areas of Odoo, reducing the number of steps between things. 
  - Think of them as sort of like "smart buttons" that you still get in forms, but across the top of the kanban view. We're excited to see where else this lands in future version of Odoo and if we can bend this new widget to our will elsewhere!
  
  
• Improved Gantt view - can you now scroll. Finally.
  
  
• Product catalog on BOMs, MOs, Invoices, etc.
  
  
• Improved barcode scanning app, including RFID support, multi-scan and automatic production creation from a scan!
  - We need to find out more with this one, but we suspect there's a Odoo IAP (In-App-Purchase) credit required for auto product creation. We're curious to know the cost, and sceptical that this is actually useful outside of small businesses. Typically you don't want new products being willy-nilly entered into the system. That's how you loose control.
  
  
• You can now edit specific valuation layers for easier revaluation.
  - Certainly makes life easier.
  
  
• Push rules are now triggered when a transfer is validated. Transfers are not created in advance, allowing more flexibility. Transfers waiting for another transfer are no longer polluting the space. All default multi-step routes have been redesigned to reflect this change.
  
  Practically this means that multi-step shipping, transfers, etc. configurations have been changed so that stock.picking records aren't all created up front! 
  - On one hand, we think this is awesome, it will resolve a whole bunch of problems with multi-step shipping, typically around sales orders being edited - honestly we're embarrassed that we didn't think of this ourselves!
  
  On the other hand we're a little worried about the customers who do want the old behaviour. We'll need to dig into find out more.
  
  
• Inventory - There's now a way to redirect stock to quality control during shipping and then automatically continue on it's way!
  - For those of our customers using quality this will really round out some of the sharper corners
  
  
• Behavioural change to the stock rule "Take from stock, if not available, trigger another rule", which launches a procurement for only the quantity missing from the new move.
  
  
• Split pickings before validating, allowing deliveries at two different locations or dates
  - This is something we've implemented ourselves and have used the OCA split picking module with great success. Very happy it's now in core.. but we are massively disappointed to see that when you edit a purchase order with multiple pickings, and change the quantity it will still generate incorrect, new pickings (cough). Having been previously fobbed off by Odoo saying that this was an unsupported scenario, we're hopeful at getting a proper fix in place now that pre-emptively splitting a picking is a "supported" scenario.
  
  
• Shipping vehicle, packing management and maybe route planning?
  - We're really interested to see how this works out in practise - we have a number of customers which use their own separate despatch management and route planning systems, whilst we're not 100% convinced that Odoo's implementation yet meets all their needs, it may be integrated enough to change the game here
  
  
• Website improvements - snippet improvements / changes, AI translation, better custom font support
  
  
• Appointments gets improvements
  - Without being too mean, Odoo SA were still using calendly themselves internally last time we booked a meeting with them. We think that says it all?
  
  
• Point of Sale has been revamped
  - We rarely touch POS. It's currently not something that really excites us, sorry!
  
  
• Improved sales quotation builder for adding custom sales information to each quote. Think "about us as a company", a "nice pretty full page logo", etc.
  - Honestly we forget if this is 17 or 18 that adds the Quotation Builder. But is cool, and it's something we don't have in our own 16.0 install, so we're looking forward to this ourselves!
  
  
• Built in sale commissions
  
  
• Sales and Invoices combined the product and description into a single field
  - Don't worry, the description is still editable!
  
  
• New Analytic budgets integrated directly into the Purchases app, not just Accounting!
  - Nice.
  
  
• Financial budgets integrated directly into the Profit and Loss report!
  - We're looking forward to seeing if we can leverage this enough to say good bye to our own spreadsheets! 
  
  
• Follow-up and Customer Statement were merged, and the Partner Ledger can now be sent directly to the customer.
  - Mixed feelings on this. In many cases we've needed to use the excellent OCA partner_statement module, and have chosen to do so because the Partner Ledger has historically been very fiddly to override. We'll need to really dig into this to see more.
  
  
• eCommerce now natively supports click-and-collect!
  
  
• Spreadsheets got a big set of improvements - too many to list individually.
  - It's still not Excel. But it is getting better.

There's a whole bunch more changes. But honestly, we feel these are the big hitters.