The day three people share one admin login, you no longer have a business system — you have a rumour machine where nothing can be traced to anyone. Proper user accounts take ten minutes and fix that forever.
Every Odoo install begins with one all-powerful admin account, and most small offices make the same mistake: the whole team logs in as admin because it is easy. It is also how prices get changed with no culprit, records vanish with no trail, and a departing employee walks away knowing the one password that runs the company. Odoo's answer is built in and free on Community: one account per person, with access rights matched to their job. This guide creates those accounts, explains rights in plain language, and ends with the habits that keep a small system honest without turning you into a full-time policeman.
Go to Settings → Users & Companies → Users and create an account for each staff member with their own email address as the login. Set a temporary password and tell them to change it on first login. The rule to announce out loud on day one: accounts are never shared, the way bank logins are never shared. This is not about suspicion; it is about the activity trail. Odoo records who created and changed records, and that quiet trail settles a hundred arguments a year — which price was promised, who confirmed the order, when the stock was adjusted. Shared logins burn that trail to the ground before the argument even starts.
On each user's form, rights are organised per application. For most apps you will see levels in the spirit of User and Administrator (wording varies slightly by app and version). A plain translation: a User can do the daily work of that app — raise quotations, confirm orders, receive stock. An Administrator of an app can also change that app's settings, price structures and configurations. Hand out app-admin rights the way you hand out keys to the safe: one person per area, chosen on purpose. A salesperson needs Sales as a user; the sales manager may hold Sales administrator. Nobody outside the owner and one deputy needs anything more.
Salesperson: CRM and Sales as user, Invoicing as user if they raise bills; no Inventory admin, no Settings access. Store keeper: Inventory as user (or its admin if they manage warehouses), Purchase as user for receiving against orders; no access to accounting figures. Accountant: Invoicing with the widest rights your edition allows, plus reporting; no power to alter stock valuation casually. Notice the pattern — each person sees a short, relevant menu instead of the whole system, which new staff consistently experience as Odoo being 'simpler' than they feared. Least access is not distrust. It is a smaller cockpit for each pilot, and fewer buttons that can be pressed by accident.
The original admin login deserves ceremony. Give it a long unique password stored in a password manager, use it only for setup, settings and emergencies, and do your own daily work from a personal account like everyone else. If your version offers two-factor authentication for accounts, switch it on for admin and accounts staff first. Then the human side: when someone leaves the company, deactivate their user the same day — in Odoo you archive the user rather than deleting them, which locks the door while keeping their name on the history they created. Departed staff with live logins are the single most common real-world ERP security failure, and it is a failure of process, not software.
Odoo distinguishes internal users (your staff) from portal users — customers or vendors you invite to see their own quotations, invoices or tickets through a limited window. Portal access is genuinely useful and genuinely safe only because it is a separate, weaker class of account: a portal user sees their own documents and nothing else. Never 'save time' by giving a customer an internal login, and never tick internal access for an outsider while experimenting. On the Enterprise edition, remember internal users are what you pay for per seat; on Community they cost nothing, which is one less excuse for sharing accounts. Either way, the rule is the same — right person, right door.
Rights drift. People change roles, gain temporary powers for a busy week, and keep them forever. Set a small ritual: once a month, open the users list and ask three questions. Who joined and got too much because we were in a hurry? Who left and is still active? Who holds app-admin rights and still needs them? Ten minutes, three questions, and your access list quietly matches reality again. Do the same review after any unpleasant incident, however small — most 'mysteries' in a business system are a forgotten permission meeting an ordinary human temptation, and both halves of that sentence are fixable.
Watch the Odoo server setup video for the install this guide builds on, then create your team's accounts while the screens are fresh in mind.
▶️ Watch Full VideoThere is no licence limit on the free Community edition — create an account for every staff member. Your real limit is your server's capacity. On Enterprise, internal users are billed per seat as a subscription, which makes tidy account management worth money as well as effort.
Rights are set per app. A user can do the daily work inside that app; an administrator of the app can also change its configuration. Separately, the main system administrator controls Settings itself. Give app-admin rights to one responsible person per area, and keep the system admin login for setup and emergencies only.
No — archive (deactivate) the user instead. Deleting can break the history attached to records they created, while archiving blocks their login immediately and keeps their name on past work for audit. Do it the same day they leave, along with changing any shared passwords they knew.