In most business relationships, the supplier sends an invoice and the customer pays it. Simple enough. But in certain industries — consignment arrangements, commission-based sales, large retail supply chains — the opposite makes more sense. The customer knows exactly what they received, they know the agreed price, and waiting for the supplier to generate an invoice just adds unnecessary delay to the payment cycle.
That’s self-billing. The customer generates the vendor bill on the supplier’s behalf and sends a copy for their records. It’s a well-established practice in industries like automotive manufacturing, agriculture, and large-scale retail, but most ERP systems either don’t support it natively or require heavy customization to make it work. Odoo just added it as a built-in feature.
How Self-Billing Works in Odoo
The setup is straightforward. You create a dedicated Purchase journal and enable the Self Billing option in its Advanced Settings. This journal becomes the home for all self-generated vendor bills, keeping them cleanly separated from regular supplier invoices in your accounting records.
Once the journal is configured, self-bills can be created either manually or automatically. Each self-bill gets a unique sequence number that’s tied to the specific partner, using the partner’s database ID (internal ID) as part of the numbering scheme. This means every supplier has their own independent numbering sequence, which matters for audit trails and reconciliation — you can instantly trace which self-bills belong to which supplier without parsing through a shared sequence.
Sending Self-Bills to Suppliers
Creating the bill is only half the workflow. The supplier needs to receive a copy for their own records. Odoo handles this through a Send popup that offers three transmission methods: email, postal mail, and Peppol electronic invoicing.
The Peppol option is particularly relevant for European businesses where electronic invoicing mandates are rolling out across member states. If both parties are registered on the Peppol network, the self-bill can be transmitted electronically with full compliance. The system checks for Peppol prerequisites and warns if the supplier’s access point isn’t compatible, which saves you from discovering delivery failures after the fact.
Where Self-Billing Makes Sense
Self-billing isn’t for every supplier relationship, and Odoo’s implementation recognizes that by making it a journal-level configuration rather than a system-wide setting. You enable it only for the specific purchasing workflows that need it.
The most common use cases include:
- Consignment arrangements where the supplier ships goods but only gets paid when the customer sells them. The customer knows exactly what sold and at what price, making them the logical party to generate the bill.
- Commission-based relationshipswhere the amount owed depends on calculations the customer controls — sales volumes, performance metrics, variable rates.
- Large retailers who receive goods in bulk and prefer to generate their own billing documents based on receiving records rather than waiting for potentially delayed or inaccurate supplier invoices.
- Agricultural supply chainswhere produce is delivered and graded on arrival, with the final price determined by the buyer’s quality assessment.
The Accounting Implications
From a bookkeeping perspective, self-bills are still vendor bills. They create the same accounting entries, hit the same accounts, and follow the same payment workflows. The difference is procedural, not financial. The dedicated journal ensures that auditors can immediately distinguish self-generated bills from supplier-initiated ones, which matters for compliance in jurisdictions that have specific rules around self-billing (several EU countries require explicit written agreements between parties before self-billing is permitted).
The per-partner sequence numbering also serves an audit purpose. If a supplier disputes a self-bill, you have a clean, partner-specific trail that doesn’t require filtering through your entire accounts payable history.
Fitting Into the Broader Accounting Stack
Self-billing joins a growing list of accounts payable improvements in Odoo’s recent releases. Combined with Peppol e-invoicing enhancements and cleaner reconciliation workflows, the accounts payable side of Odoo Accounting is becoming significantly more capable for businesses with complex supplier relationships. Self-billing was one of the notable gaps for companies in consignment-heavy industries, and its addition as a native feature removes what was previously a customization project.