If you’ve ever set up Odoo’s Sales module for a new company, you know the drill: install the app, open Settings, scroll down to the Quotations section, and toggle on “Quotation Templates” before anyone can use structured layouts on their quotes. In Odoo 20, that toggle is gone. Quotation and section templates are now enabled from the moment you open the Sales app — no configuration, no checkbox, no detour through settings. It’s a small change on paper that quietly removes one of the most common friction points in new deployments.
Templates Without the Setup Tax
The old workflow had a subtle cost that went beyond the extra clicks. Because templates were opt-in, many smaller teams never discovered them at all. Sales reps would build quotes from scratch every time, copying and pasting product lines from previous orders, manually typing section headers, and hoping the formatting stayed consistent. The feature existed; it just sat behind a door that nobody thought to open.
Making templates always available means every new Odoo 20 installation ships with the full quoting toolkit from day one. A sales manager creating their first quotation immediately sees the option to apply a template, organize lines into sections, and save the result for the rest of the team. There’s no moment where someone has to know the feature exists and go looking for it.
Section Headers Get Their Own Controls
The bigger functional change is what happens inside a quotation once you start building it. Section headers — those divider rows that group line items into logical blocks like “Hardware,” “Services,” or “Optional Add-Ons” — now have their own drop-down menu. Click on a section header and you get options to rearrange, duplicate, or remove the entire section and its contents as a unit.
This matters because section management used to be line-by-line work. If you wanted to move a “Maintenance” section from the bottom of a quote to the middle, you had to drag each line item individually, then reposition the header itself. With the new drop-down, a section is a single object you manipulate as a whole. For quotes with five or six sections and dozens of line items, the time savings are significant.
There’s also section-level quantity and unit editing. Instead of adjusting quantities product by product within a section, you can now set a quantity multiplier at the section level. It’s the kind of feature that sounds minor until you’re building a quote for a customer who wants the same package deployed across three office locations — change the section quantity to three and every line item underneath scales accordingly.
Save as Template, Right From the Quote
The other addition that will change daily habits is the “Save as Template” action, available directly from the quotation form. In previous versions, creating a template meant navigating to the Configuration menu, building it from scratch, and manually adding products and sections. Now you can build a real quotation for a real customer, get it exactly right, and then save it as a reusable template in a single click.
This flips the template creation workflow on its head. Instead of templates being an abstract configuration task that someone sets up before the team starts selling, they become a natural byproduct of daily work. Your best-performing quote becomes the starting point for every similar deal going forward. Sales managers who have been asking reps to “use the standard layout” without giving them an easy way to do it finally have a workflow that matches the request.
The Compounding Effect on Consistency
Individually, each of these changes is a quality-of-life improvement. Together, they shift how quotation standards propagate through a sales organization. When templates require zero setup, every team has them. When section management is fast, reps actually use structured layouts instead of dumping products into a flat list. When saving a template takes one click, good formatting reproduces itself.
The result is that Odoo 20 quietly makes it harder to send a poorly-structured quote than a well-structured one. That’s the kind of design decision that won’t show up in a feature comparison chart but will show up in the consistency of every proposal that leaves the system.