Allwis vs Odoo
The same idea, without the implementation project.
Odoo and Allwis agree on the diagnosis. We disagree about how much of the work should be yours.
Four systems. Not one of them can consolidate a group.
Xero has no native consolidation, and its published position on years of requests for it is that it is not currently planned. Every QuickBooks Online subscription is a separate island. Zoho Books has no native mechanism for group financial statements. Odoo is a full ERP and still sends you elsewhere for this.
All four answer a group with two companies the same way: another subscription, another login, another export that is out of date by the time anyone reads it.
In Allwis the second company is a setting. Inter-company elimination, FX translation and non-controlling interests sit in the ledger you already have.
The short version
No implementation project
You sign up, import your ledger, read the briefing our AI writes about your own books, and start.
New Zealand is where Odoo stops
NZ is absent from its payroll localisations, and the NZ route is a connector to a third-party payroll that imports journal entries back.
No AUSTRAC or DIA reporting
Neither exists in Odoo — which, since 1 July 2026, is a live obligation for Australian accountants providing designated services, not a nice-to-have.
Side by side
| Allwis | Odoo | |
|---|---|---|
| One integrated platform | Yes | Yes — genuinely theirs too. |
| Time to a working system | Sign up and import | Commonly a partner-led implementation |
| Hosting, upgrades and version migrations | Ours | Yours, or your host’s, depending on edition |
| Payroll — Australia | Native — PAYG, super, ABA; STP Phase 2 files you lodge through a gateway | Native in v19 Enterprise, with STP and SuperStream — properly built, and they lodge STP where we prepare the file. Not to be dismissed. |
| Payroll — New Zealand | Native — PAYE, KiwiSaver | Not a payroll localisation; an Employment Hero connector |
| AML/CTF — AUSTRAC and DIA | Yes | No |
| Director penalty exposure (AU) | Yes | No |
| Live reports in the spreadsheet you already use | First-party Excel add-in; Sheets in Marketplace review | A spreadsheet inside Odoo; live formulas become static values on export |
| Choose your AI model | Nine providers | OpenAI or Google Gemini |
| Run the model on your own network | Yes — outbound-only connector, no inbound port | No |
| AI spend budgets, per-task controls, decision log | Yes | No |
| Manufacturing, warehouse, POS, field service | Limited | Deep — theirs, decisively. |
| Open source and self-hostable | No | Yes — theirs. |
Every claim about Odoo is sourced at the foot of this page.
Your model, your infrastructure
The assistant is table stakes. Where it runs is not. Every system here has an AI assistant now. None of them will tell you which model just read your payroll file.
Allwis is model-agnostic by design. Point it at OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Kimi, Mistral, GLM or Meta — your key, your account, your bill. Route different jobs to different models: a cheap one for categorising bank lines, a strong one for auditing a bill. Or do not send it out at all.
Run the model on your own hardware — Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, anything speaking OpenAI’s chat-completions format. A small connector beside your model dials out to us over HTTPS. No inbound port, no firewall change, works behind NAT. Your model never becomes something on the internet.
Then switch on self-hosted-only mode, and turn off the shared fallback so a request fails rather than leaves your network. Benchmark your own model against the cloud providers on the same tasks first, so it is a measured decision rather than a leap.
And govern it: a monthly AI budget with a hard stop, individual AI tasks switched off, PII masking forced per task, token caps, and a log of every call with the model that made it, its reasoning and what it cost.
Excel & Google Sheets
Accountants live in Excel. We stopped fighting it.
Allwis for Excel puts your live statements in your own workbook — profit & loss, balance sheet, trial balance, cash flow, aged receivables, aged payables and any custom report you have built, with comparison periods, multiple entities and your budget as a column beside actuals. Press refresh and the figures are current. Build your own schedules around them; they survive the refresh.
Install it from the Microsoft 365 admin centre for the whole firm, or sideload it yourself in a minute. On every plan — not the top tier.
And spreadsheets inside Allwis too — depreciation schedules, workpapers, the calculations behind a journal — attached to the record they support, versioned, and frozen once attached, so the workpaper behind a posted entry cannot quietly change.
Where Odoo is the better choice
No product is the right answer for everyone, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading. Here is where we would tell you to stay.
You make physical things
Manufacturing, warehousing, MRP and point of sale are Odoo’s depth, and we do not pretend to match them.
You want the source
Open source and self-hosting are real requirements for some organisations, and they are not requirements we meet.
You have developers and want to own the system
If you are going to build on a platform for a decade, owning the code is a defensible choice. Odoo Studio also covers a good deal of customisation without one.
What switching looks like
Contacts, organisations, chart of accounts and transaction history import from any CSV or Excel export, with columns detected and mapped for you and a review step before anything is written.
You do not have to switch everything
Take the ledger and keep your CRM. Take the CRM and keep your accountant’s system. Take the helpdesk on its own. The rest is there when — and if — you want it.
Sources
Every claim we make about another product is based on publicly available information, linked below with the date we checked it. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners; we are not affiliated with any of them. If we have got something wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
- Odoo 19 ships a first-party Australian payroll localisation with STP and SuperStream via the SuperChoice API — odoo.com (checked 2026-08-23)
- Odoo’s NZ payroll route is an Employment Hero connector that imports payslip journal entries — odoo.com (checked 2026-08-23)
- Odoo formulas with no Excel equivalent are replaced by their evaluated result on export — odoo.com (checked 2026-08-23)
- Odoo 19’s AI app routes to OpenAI or Google Gemini; a key is required on Odoo.sh and self-hosted — usecarly.com (checked 2026-08-23)
Last reviewed 23 August 2026.