Finance teams running Odoo hit a wall the moment their invoicing volume outgrows a single accountant clicking "Confirm." Out of the box, Odoo lets anyone with Billing rights post a customer invoice, validate a vendor bill, or issue a credit note with no structured sign-off in between. There is no native concept of "this bill over $10,000 needs the department head, then the CFO." The result is uncontrolled spend, weak segregation of duties, audit findings, and credit notes that quietly reverse revenue without anyone senior ever seeing them. Odoo's generic Settings-level approval flags are coarse and do not chain multiple approvers by amount, journal, analytic account, or company.

We build a dedicated multi-level approval engine that sits on top of account.move and gates the transition to posted. The core is a configurable approval-matrix model (models.Model) where you define tiers by document type (customer invoice, vendor bill, customer/vendor refund, credit note), amount thresholds, journal, company, and analytic distribution. When a document is submitted, a compute method (@api.depends on amount, partner, and journal) resolves which tiers apply and generates an ordered chain of approval-request records. State moves through draft → to_approve → approved → posted, with a refused branch that returns the document to the author with a mandatory reason. We override action_post() so an unapproved move can never be posted — via the UI, an imported batch, a scheduled action, or the XML-RPC/JSON-RPC API — closing the back doors that a button-only solution leaves open.

Security is enforced the Odoo-native way: approver rights live in dedicated groups wired through ir.model.access.csv, and record rules ensure an approver only sees requests routed to their tier and company. Each approval writes an immutable audit line (who, when, level, comment) rendered in the chatter and available in a QWeb PDF approval certificate for auditors. Automated actions and server-side crons handle escalation and reminders — for example, nudging an approver after 48 hours or auto-escalating to the next tier. Delegation (out-of-office substitute approvers), parallel vs. sequential tiers, and self-approval prevention are all part of the model. Views are delivered as clean XML/OWL with a smart button showing pending approvals and a dedicated "My Approvals" dashboard, so nothing about the standard Odoo accounting experience feels bolted on. The build respects Community vs. Enterprise differences — we do not assume Studio or Enterprise-only approval primitives are present, and we target Odoo 17.0, 18.0 and 19.0 explicitly.

Because this is build-to-order, nothing ships until we have agreed your approval matrix on a scoping call: your tiers, thresholds, roles, and which document types are in scope. We then build against a copy of your data on a staging database, run UAT with your finance team, and hand over installable source, a git repository, and documentation. Typical delivery is 2 to 4 weeks from confirmed scope. Pricing starts from $299 (indicative, single-company base scope); multi-company approval chains, deep localization of tax/credit-note rules, integrations with external procurement or expense systems, and large historical data migration increase the quoted scope. You receive a fixed quote after the scoping call — never a surprise.