You know the scene
It is the 25th. Somewhere in a French SME, it is the same ritual every month.
Marie, in HR, opens an Excel file. She enters the month's new hires, departures, signed amendments, sick leave, time off taken, overtime worked by the workshop team, the exceptional bonus granted by the CEO last week. The file gets longer, columns are added, colors pile up.
At 4:30 p.m., Marie emails it to the payroll firm. With one sentence: “Sorry, I forgot to mention: Sophie went down to 80% from the 15th. And can you put Karim back on a permanent contract? He was on a fixed-term contract until the 30th.”
On the 28th, the firm sends back the payslips. Marie checks them. Three errors. An exchange of emails, a phone call. Correction on the morning of the 30th. Transfer scheduled in the afternoon.
On the 2nd of the following month, the accountant asks for the payroll journal entry. Marie forwards the PDF received from the firm. The accountant re-enters it, line by line, in Odoo. Half a day. Plus another half day understanding why the total does not exactly match the previous month's employer contributions.
What has just played out, over five days and four people, is the payroll of a 40-person SME.
And it happens like this everywhere. Maybe even at your company.
The problem is not payroll. The problem is what surrounds it.
Payroll itself, in 2026, works very well. The firms are competent, the specialized payroll software is solid, the rate tables are up to date, the DSN goes out on time.
The problem is not in payroll. It is in everything around payroll: collecting the information, transmitting it, re-entering it, reintegrating it into accounting.
Today, in most French SMEs and mid-sized companies:
- HR information is in Odoo, but it goes to payroll as Excel files.
- Payslips come back as PDFs, but they are re-entered by hand in accounting.
- Accounting entries are reconstructed from a summary, month after month.
- No one has a complete, reliable view of personnel costs on the same date.
And every step in this chain is an opportunity for error.
The 25th of the month, 2026 edition
Now, imagine the same SME, six months later, after setting up a connection between Odoo and its payroll software.
It is the 25th. Marie is at her screen. But this time, she opens no Excel file.
She checks her HR dashboard in Odoo. All of the month's hires are already in place: they were created as they happened, from the employees' first day. Amendments were recorded at the time of the electronic signature. Sick leave was reported as supporting documents arrived. Time off was validated through the approval workflow. Overtime was recorded by the team leaders on their timesheets. The exceptional bonus was recorded last week, at the time of the decision.
Everything has already gone to the payroll manager, automatically, day after day. No Excel file. No email.
Marie clicks a button: Check the month's variables. A page summarizes everything that will be included in the payslip. Everything is in order. She validates.
On the 30th, the firm produces the payslips. Zero correction exchanges, because the information was right from the start.
On the 2nd of the following month, the accountant opens Odoo. The payroll accounting entry is already there: imported automatically, in the right journal, in the right company, reconciled with the corresponding social contributions. He checks it. He validates it. Five minutes.
Marie has gained a day. The accountant, half a day. And the CFO has something more valuable that he did not have before: the month's payroll cost is known in Odoo on the 2nd, not the 15th.
The module that makes it possible
This transformation is not magic. It relies on a module — a connector — that we have offered our customers for several years, and that makes Odoo and the OpenPaye payroll software talk to each other in both directions.
This module has a name: the ANOR connector for OpenPaye. It is designed, developed, and maintained by ANOR, our technical partner, which installs it at our customers' sites, configures it, and trains the HR and accounting teams.
What the module handles automatically
From Odoo to payroll, with no re-entry, the module transmits:
- Employee records and their personal information (title, marital status, employee number, contact details).
- Employment contracts (type, salary, working time, professional status, pension scheme).
- Absences and leave, with their payroll code: paid leave, sick leave, RTT (working time reduction) days, unpaid leave, maternity-paternity, work accident, and any other code specific to your collective agreement.
- The month's variable items: overtime (standard, 25% premium, 50% premium), seniority bonuses, 13th month, paid leave allowance, meal vouchers, transport allowance.
- Variable compensation: sales commissions, target bonuses, performance bonuses. Odoo already knows the sales invoiced by each salesperson, calculates the commission according to the defined rule, and automatically transmits it to payroll.
From payroll to Odoo, in return:
- The complete monthly accounting entry comes back into Odoo: gross salaries, net salaries, social contributions, employer and employee contributions.
- Everything is recorded in the right journal, in the right company, with no human intervention.
Multi-company: the module's great strength
For groups with several legal entities, this is where the module makes the difference. Each company in the group has its own payroll file at OpenPaye and its own accounting journal in Odoo. No risk of mixing entities. The group director manages everything from a single Odoo, but each subsidiary retains its full legal and accounting autonomy, as the law requires.
Many connectors on the market are designed for a single company. Ours is natively multi-company.
Why ANOR develops it — and not a third-party vendor
Three reasons our customers appreciate:
- An identified, reachable team. No distant vendor, no unanswered tickets. A question, an adjustment, a new type of bonus to add? The ANOR team handles it directly.
- Ongoing maintenance. When Odoo releases a new version, the module follows. You do not find yourself stuck a year later because your connector is no longer compatible.
- Real adaptability. The module is designed to evolve with your needs: new bonus, new collective agreement, new subsidiary to connect, new commission rule. ANOR adjusts it, we deploy it, you use it.
It is this vertical integration — a single provider that masters development, deployment, and training — that lets our customers have a reliable, lasting solution, not a generic connector abandoned at the first version upgrade.
What our customers say after six months
The feedback we hear most often in the reviews we hold six months after go-live:
“We no longer wonder whether the payslip is right. We know it is.”
“Our accountant stopped grumbling on the 2nd of the month.”
“For the first time, the CEO has a day-by-day view of payroll cost.”
“We hired three more people without needing to hire someone on the admin side.”
And a calculation we make systematically: between one and two working days saved per month, on both the HR and accounting sides. Over a year, that is the equivalent of half a full-time position freed up for higher-value tasks.
The right time to get started
If you recognize yourself in the first scene — the 25th of the month with the Excel files, the emails, the re-entries — then the topic is probably already ripe at your company.
Three simple questions can confirm it:
- How much time does your HR team spend each month preparing and checking payroll variables?
- How much time does your accountant spend integrating the payroll entry into accounting?
- Have you ever had a payslip error because some information was not sent to the firm in time?
If the sum of the first two exceeds one day per month, or if the third has already happened more than once this year, the equation is very simple: the solution pays for itself within the year.
In one sentence
Payroll should no longer be a monthly event. It should be a continuous, integrated, automatic flow that demands your attention only in the rare cases where a human decision is needed.
This is exactly what we put in place for our customers.
Want to see what it would look like at your company? We offer a first one-hour meeting to analyze your situation and quantify what you would gain. Get in touch.