Your whole HR function, in one system.
Recruitment, contracts, attendance, leave, appraisals and payroll — connected, so an employee record is entered once and follows the person from application to final payslip.
One record, from application to exit.
Most HR pain comes from the handoffs — recruitment data retyped into employee records, attendance retyped into payroll. In Odoo, each stage inherits from the one before it.
Hire
Job postings, a careers portal, applicant tracking through interview stages, and skills-based screening. A hired applicant becomes an employee record in one click — no re-entry.
Onboard
Contracts and templates, document collection with expiry alerts, equipment assignment, and onboarding checklists so nothing is missed on day one.
Work
Attendance and working schedules, leave requests with approval routing, timesheets, and shift planning across branches.
Develop
Appraisals on a schedule or on request, goal setting, skills tracking, certifications, and training records tied back to the appraisal.
Pay
Payroll structures, statutory deductions, payslip generation and expense reimbursement — computed from the attendance and leave data already in the system.
Exit
Offboarding with reasons recorded, contract end dates applied automatically, equipment returned, and records archived rather than deleted.
The Odoo HR app stack.
These work together out of the box. You don't have to deploy all of them — most companies start with two or three and grow into the rest.
Employees
Central employee records, departments, org chart, work schedules, and document storage.
Recruitment
Job positions, careers page, applicant pipeline, interview forms and hiring analytics.
Time Off
Leave types, accruals, allocations, approval routing and team calendar visibility.
Attendances
Check-in and check-out, worked hours, overtime tracking and attendance reporting.
Payroll
Salary structures, allowances and deductions, payslip runs and payroll reporting.
Appraisals
Review cycles, goals, self and manager assessments, and skills development tracking.
Expenses
Employee expense claims, receipt capture, approval workflow and reimbursement.
Planning & Timesheets
Shift scheduling across sites, plus time recorded against projects and tasks.
Standard HR covers a desk-based workforce well. Not every workforce sits at a desk.
If your staff are spread across workshops, branches, and field sites, four gaps show up almost immediately. None of them exist in standard Odoo — all four are things we build.
Geofenced attendance
Check-in validated against a defined location radius, so attendance reflects where someone actually was — not just that they tapped a button. Essential when staff report to sites rather than an office.
Gate pass & outside duty
A digital request-and-approval workflow for staff leaving site during working hours, integrated with attendance so time out is accounted for rather than argued about later.
Biometric & facial verification
Face enrollment and verification at check-in, or integration with existing biometric devices — closing the buddy-punching gap that simple check-in buttons leave open.
A mobile app staff will actually use
Check-in, leave requests, payslips and gate passes from a phone, designed to work in one tap — because field adoption depends entirely on how little friction there is.
Statutory deductions, configured correctly.
Odoo's payroll engine is capable, but it ships generic. Tanzanian statutory obligations have to be configured — and configured wrongly, they produce payslips that look right and aren't. These are the components we set up and verify against real payslips.
| Component | Side | What it affects |
|---|---|---|
| PAYE | Employee deduction | Must reduce net pay, and must compute on taxable allowances — not basic salary alone |
| NSSF — employee | Employee deduction | Social security contribution deducted from gross |
| NSSF — employer | Employer contribution | Employer cost; must be excluded from net pay |
| WCF | Employer contribution | Workers compensation; employer cost only |
| SDL | Employer contribution | Skills development levy; employer cost only |
| HESLB | Conditional deduction | Loan repayment, applied only where a deduction advice exists for that employee |
The common failure: statutory items configured in the wrong category — so an employer contribution silently reduces net pay, or PAYE computes on basic salary only. Both produce payslips that balance internally but are wrong. We verify against computed payslips before go-live, not after the first payroll run.
An automotive group with 390 staff across multiple regions.
A Tanzanian automotive company came to us with eight HR requirements and a workforce that mostly wasn't in an office — technicians and field staff spread across branches and districts.
Our gap analysis against standard Odoo was blunt about where the work sat. Leave management was almost ready out of the box. Payroll needed localization and configuration. But attendance was roughly 70% custom build, and gate pass didn't exist in Odoo at all.
Rather than scatter that across four or five separate add-ons, we scoped it as a single unified module — one namespace, one data model, one thing to maintain and upgrade. That decision alone cut the projected custom development timeline substantially.
Before you ask.
Does Odoo handle Tanzanian payroll out of the box?+
The payroll engine is fully capable, but statutory components have to be configured — PAYE, NSSF employee and employer, WCF, SDL, and conditional HESLB deductions. Getting the categories right matters more than most people expect: an employer contribution placed in the wrong category will silently reduce net pay and the payslip will still balance. We configure and verify against real computed payslips.
Can Odoo track attendance for staff who aren't in an office?+
Not on its own. Standard Odoo Attendances handles check-in and check-out, but has no concept of location validation or facial verification. Geofenced mobile attendance is a custom build — it's one of the most common things we're asked for, and one of the main reasons companies with field workforces need more than a standard deployment.
Do we need all the HR apps at once?+
No, and we'd usually advise against it. Leave and payroll are the fastest wins for most companies — they solve visible pain quickly and build confidence. Recruitment, appraisals and anything needing custom development are better sequenced after the core is stable and people are actually using it.
Will it work across multiple branches or companies?+
Yes. Odoo handles multi-company and multi-branch structures natively, with separate approval chains, working schedules and reporting per entity. This is worth designing deliberately at the start, because the structure is harder to change once historical data is attached to it.
What about employee data protection?+
Employee records are among the most sensitive data a business holds. We set up role-based access control, restrict salary visibility to HR and payroll roles, and enable audit logging. Where data residency matters, hosting location becomes part of the design conversation rather than an afterthought.
Which part of HR hurts most right now?
Payroll that takes a week? Attendance nobody trusts? Leave tracked in a spreadsheet? Tell us the one that costs you the most time, and we'll tell you what fixing it involves.