There’s a category of ERP feature that everyone knows exists but almost nobody uses. Not because it doesn’t solve a real problem, but because the implementation is just complicated enough that procurement teams default to doing it manually instead. Odoo’s Purchase Suggest feature has lived in that category for a while now. The idea was always solid — let the system look at outbound demand and tell you what to reorder — but the execution involved too many configuration steps, too much prerequisite knowledge, and a workflow that felt more like a textbook exercise than a tool built for someone with thirty purchase orders to process before lunch.
That has changed. Odoo has reworked the Suggest feature with a focus on making the calculation logic transparent and the workflow practical. The new implementation strips away the conceptual overhead and presents procurement teams with something they can actually adopt without a training session: click a button, see what needs reordering, confirm the quantities, and generate the purchase orders.
What Suggest Actually Does (And Why It’s Different From Reordering Rules)
The Suggest feature is a push-based replenishment tool. That distinction matters, because Odoo also has pull-based replenishment through reordering rules, and the two serve different procurement philosophies. Reordering rules trigger when stock drops below a minimum threshold — they’re reactive, monitoring inventory levels and creating purchase orders when safety stock is breached. They work well for consumables and fast-moving items where you always want to maintain a buffer.
Suggest works differently. Instead of monitoring stock levels, it reads your validated delivery orders — the outbound demand that your sales team has already committed to — and calculates how much additional stock you need to purchase to fulfill those commitments. It’s not asking “are we running low?” It’s asking “do we have enough to ship what we’ve promised?”
This makes Suggest particularly valuable for businesses that operate on a make-to-order or buy-to-order basis, where inventory levels fluctuate based on specific customer commitments rather than general demand patterns. It’s also useful for seasonal businesses that can’t rely on historical demand to set reorder points, because the demand they’re fulfilling this month might look nothing like last month.
The Calculation: Demand Minus What You Already Have
The math behind Suggest is deliberately simple, and the rework makes it completely transparent. The system looks at three numbers for each product: how much you need (from validated delivery orders), how much you have (on-hand inventory), and how much is already on the way (from existing purchase orders that haven’t been received yet). The suggested quantity is the gap: demand minus on-hand minus incoming.
If you have 120 units of demand from pending deliveries, 45 units sitting in the warehouse, and 25 units on a purchase order that’s en route from your supplier, the system suggests ordering 50 more. It’s arithmetic, not an algorithm, and that simplicity is the point. Procurement managers can look at the suggested quantity and immediately verify it against their own understanding of the situation. There’s no black box, no “the system said so” justification that falls apart under scrutiny.
The previous version of Suggest did fundamentally the same calculation, but the workflow around it was more opaque. The configuration requirements were scattered across multiple documentation pages, the examples were overly detailed, and the relationship between prerequisites and outcomes wasn’t immediately clear. The rework consolidates all of this into a single, streamlined flow.
Four Prerequisites, Not Fourteen
One of the biggest improvements is in how the feature communicates its setup requirements. The previous implementation spread its prerequisites across multiple sections and presented them as conceptual explanations rather than a checklist. The new version is direct: you need four things configured before Suggest will work.
First, both the Inventory and Purchase applications need to be installed. This sounds obvious, but in a modular ERP system where different departments often manage their own app configurations, it’s a legitimate source of confusion. Second, you need validated delivery orders in the system — the outbound demand signals that the calculation depends on. Without them, there’s nothing for the system to calculate against.
Third, the products you want to reorder need vendor pricelists configured. This is what allows the system to generate purchase orders with correct pricing rather than just giving you a quantity and leaving you to figure out the rest. Fourth, the products themselves need to be properly configured with a “Buy” route and an assigned vendor. Without this, the system knows you need more stock but doesn’t know where to get it from.
That’s it. Four things. The previous documentation made it feel like setting up Suggest required a deep understanding of Odoo’s inventory routing architecture. The reality is much simpler, and the reworked experience reflects that.
From the Catalog to the Purchase Order in Three Clicks
The workflow itself starts in the Purchase module’s product catalog. There’s a Suggest button that triggers the calculation across all eligible products. The system identifies which products have unmet demand, runs the demand-minus-on-hand-minus-incoming calculation for each one, and presents the results. From there, the procurement team reviews the suggested quantities, adjusts anything that needs adjusting, and confirms to generate the purchase orders.
The purchase orders are created with the vendor and pricing information already populated from the product configuration. There’s no intermediate step where someone has to look up which vendor supplies which product or what the current negotiated price is. All of that was established during the one-time product setup, and the Suggest workflow simply uses it.
For procurement teams that process dozens of reorder decisions daily, this workflow reduction is significant. The manual alternative — checking delivery orders, cross-referencing stock levels, looking up vendor pricing, and creating purchase orders one by one — is the kind of repetitive process that eats hours every week without adding any value. The calculation is always the same; only the numbers change. Automating it isn’t just convenient, it’s a recognition that procurement teams should be spending their time on vendor negotiations and supply chain strategy, not arithmetic.
When to Use Suggest Instead of Reordering Rules
The practical question most Odoo users will face is whether to use Suggest, reordering rules, or both. The answer depends on how your business thinks about inventory.
If you maintain buffer stock and want the system to automatically keep you above a minimum level, reordering rules are the right tool. They run in the background, they don’t require manual intervention, and they keep your shelves stocked based on thresholds you set once and forget about (until you need to adjust them).
If your purchasing is driven by specific customer orders and you don’t want to hold excess inventory, Suggest is the better fit. It ties purchasing directly to committed demand, which means you’re buying exactly what you need to fulfill what you’ve sold. There’s less risk of over-ordering, less capital tied up in warehouse shelves, and a clearer audit trail connecting each purchase to the customer orders it supports.
Many businesses will use both — reordering rules for staples and high-velocity items, Suggest for project-based purchases or slow-moving specialty products. Odoo supports this hybrid approach without conflict. The two features operate on different signals (stock levels vs. delivery orders) and generate independent purchase orders, so they don’t interfere with each other.
A Feature That Finally Matches Its Promise
The Purchase Suggest rework isn’t a new feature. It’s a feature that already existed being refined into something that works the way procurement teams actually think. The calculation logic was always sound; what changed is the packaging around it. Clearer prerequisites, a more transparent calculation, fewer steps between “I need to reorder” and “the purchase order is created.”
That kind of refinement doesn’t generate the excitement of a brand-new module or an AI integration, but it’s arguably more valuable to the people who use the system every day. Procurement teams don’t need their ERP to be impressive. They need it to be fast, accurate, and out of the way. This version of Suggest gets a lot closer to that standard.