Manufacturing and Export: Odoo as the Document Engine for Contracts, Annexes and Bilingual CMR

For manufacturing and trading companies that work with export, paperwork is a daily fact of life. The documents have to be right the first time. We are talking about purchase contracts, order annexes and international CMR consignment notes. We built an Odoo based system that keeps all of this information in one place. The solution has been running in production for two years.

Challenge

The company was growing fast. Handling contracts and their annexes by hand had become a bottleneck. Every client needed its own contract with annexes numbered in a clean, consistent sequence. The numbering could not duplicate or jump, even when an order was cancelled or copied, and at the start of a new year the numbers had to roll over cleanly. Every export shipment needed an official CMR consignment note with all the mandatory fields, in both Lithuanian and English. And all of it had to be simple enough that the operations manager could prepare a document straight from her phone.

Solution

We extended the Odoo sales and inventory modules with a dedicated workflow for managing contracts and annexes. New contracts now get their numbers automatically, and the partner details, dates, VAT rates and countries fill in on their own. Annexes are attached to a contract with their own separate numbering and linked to specific sales orders. We built strict logic that protects the numbering from errors when order statuses change. The partner record now shows a clear tree: the contract, its annexes and the related orders.

We created a full CMR consignment note with every official field, including sender, consignee, carrier, cargo value, dangerous goods markings and payment terms. The number is assigned automatically and the consignee details come straight from the order. Invoices, contracts, annexes and CMR documents are all ready in two languages. We sorted out the Lithuanian wording, the VAT phrasing and the headers. The manager now produces all of these documents from a mobile device too.

Result

The system has run in production without interruption for two years. The contract numbering stays stable. Export documents are prepared quickly and correctly in both languages. The CMR generates itself directly from the sales order data. For management we prepared a control report that shows the ordered, shipped and remaining quantity in tonnes for each contract and annex. The report exports to Excel and matches the client's requirements exactly.