Odoo supports multiple companies in a single database and there are some big changes to this in Odoo 13.

In the above example from the demo database, the user is authorized to three companies and has selected all of them (which was not possible before).

The ‘current’ company is the Demo Company, as shown by the grey highlighting and the title bar (in purple). You can switch by clicking on another company name, or you can deselect a company by using the tick box.

If a user has selected multiple companies (as above):

• Editing will be in the company of the data / document
• A newly created record will use:
  • your current company (in most cases) OR
  • no company (for products and contacts) OR
  • the company of the related document (e.g. if you create a delivery for a sales order, it will be in the same company)

So you can see that after we switch to My Belgian Company that it is shown in the title bar.

The list of Quotations is for all three selected companies. If you click on “Create” the Quotation will be for My Belgian Company because that is the current company.

In previous versions of Odoo it is possible to set up a structure with ‘parent’ and ‘child’ companies and some data is shared. This has been removed, and instead users can choose one or more of the companies (from the ones to which they are authorized).

Tabs

One new feature is that you can work with different companies in each of your browser tabs. If you plan to do this, you should set different “favicons” for each company (in the company profile).

Shared data

Products and contacts (e.g. customers and suppliers) can still be shared across companies.

Products

In Odoo 12 and earlier there is an option for “Common Product Catalog”. This has been removed in Odoo 13, but is now the standard behaviour. As a default the company field is blank, meaning that products are now shared across companies.

To limit a product to a single company, enter the company name here (and you could set up defaults or Automated Actions to make this easier).

The record rule associated with “Common Product Catalog” has been removed in Odoo 13 and this is handled by the ORM.

Contacts

More information on Contacts and MultiCompany

The logic for Contacts is the same as for products, so if the company (on the Sales & Purchase tab) is left blank the contact is shared across companies.

If you want to set this to the current company you can use User-Defined Defaults (or Automated Actions).

The option on the settings menu for “Common Contact Book” has been removed, along with the associated Record Rule, and contacts are shared unless you specify a company.

There is now a Global Record Rule for Contacts (res.partner):

['|', '|',
     ('partner_share', '=', False),
     ('company_id', 'in', company_ids),
     ('company_id', '=', False)]

partner_share is TRUE for Odoo internal users but not for portal users or other partners (e.g. customers and suppliers).

This means that:

• Customers and suppliers are filtered by the multi-company rules
• Internal Users in one company are visible in other companies

Configuration

In General Settings, select “Multi-company” (and select “Inter-Company transactions” if required).

Technical information

Multi-company Guidelines (Odoo website)

Note

When Odoo 13 was released there was a problem with multi-company for Contacts: users could view customers in companies to which they were not authorized. There is now a fix that is in the current release (this adds the Global Record Rule shown above)