Manufacturing and sales don’t share much DNA. One runs on physical labor, timers, and work center throughput. The other runs on proposals, pricing, and persuasion. But both just received the same kind of upgrade: structural clarity where there was previously a monolithic blob.
Shop Floor Operators Can Now Badge In and Out of Work Orders
Odoo’s Shop Floor module — the companion interface to the Manufacturing app — has gained a badge-based time tracking system that lets individual operators clock in and out of specific work orders using their employee PIN.
This isn’t a peripheral feature. On any busy production floor, knowing who worked on what, and for how long, is the difference between accurate costing and educated guessing. Until now, tracking that granularity required workarounds or external time-tracking tools.
How It Works
The system introduces an Edit Operatorsbutton that lets supervisors or workers select which employees are active in the current session. Once operators are added, they sign in by clicking their name and entering a PIN through a number pad popup — the same PIN used across Odoo’s Attendances kiosk and Point of Sale.
Once signed in, the operator panel displays each active worker’s assigned work center and an individual timer for every work order they’re running. Clicking a work order card pauses its timer. Hitting Mark as Done completes it. The system captures time at the individual work order level, distinguishing between current session time and historical totals.
Viewing the Data
Time tracking data surfaces in two places. The Work Orders view now includes a Real Duration column showing total time spent per order. And within any Manufacturing Order, you can drill into individual work order durations to see exactly where production time went.
For manufacturers running job costing, this is the missing piece. You can now trace labor time from the shop floor all the way through to the manufacturing order without leaving Odoo.
Profile Switching for Shared Workstations
The system supports multiple operators per session, which matters in environments where a single tablet or terminal is shared across a work center. Workers switch profiles by tapping their name, entering their PIN, and picking up where they left off. Removing an operator is equally straightforward — uncheck their profile in the Edit Operators dialog.
The PDF Quote Builder Splits Into Three Focused Sections
On the sales side, the PDF Quote Builder has been restructured from a single long documentation page into three distinct sections. This isn’t just a documentation change — it reflects a clearer mental model for how the feature actually works.
The three new sections are:
- Add Dynamic Text to PDFs— Covers form fields, variable mapping, and how to inject order-specific data like customer names, amounts, dates, and partner information into PDF templates.
- Add PDFs to Quotes— Focuses on attaching PDF documents to quotation templates, with visibility controls for whether documents appear on quotations, confirmed orders, or inside the quote itself.
- Add PDFs to Products— A new section dedicated to product-level PDF attachments, including e-commerce publishing settings and print functionality for confirmed quotes.
Previously, all of this lived on a single page that you had to scroll through to find the specific workflow you needed. Now, each use case has its own entry point with navigation cards on the main page.
Why Modular Documentation Matters for Complex Features
The PDF Quote Builder is one of those features that sounds simple — attach a PDF to a quote — but quickly gets intricate when you factor in dynamic variables, product-level attachments, and visibility rules. Splitting the documentation into task-specific pages means sales teams can find exactly what they need without wading through unrelated configuration steps.
The same principle applies to the shop floor time tracking. By breaking operator management into distinct actions — add, switch, remove — and separating time viewing into per-work-order and per-manufacturing-order perspectives, the feature becomes usable by floor workers who need speed, not a manual.
Both changes share a common thread: taking a feature that existed but was hard to navigate, and restructuring it so each task has a clear starting point. For teams using Odoo’s AI-powered tools alongside manufacturing and sales, these cleaner workflows feed better data into forecasting and automation systems downstream.