Twenty quiet minutes in the company settings decide what every invoice, quotation and report your business sends for years will look like. This is the page that gets those fields right the first time.
New Odoo users rush to add customers and products, then wonder why invoices print a wrong address, a stranger's currency, or no logo at all. Every document Odoo produces borrows its identity from one place: the company record in Settings. Even better, choices made here — especially your country — steer the tax and chart-of-accounts templates Odoo prepares for you, because it loads localisation built for that country. Fill the company in before the data, in the order below, and every later screen becomes easier. It is the least exciting page in this series and quietly the most valuable one.
Go to Settings and find the Companies section — your install already contains one company, created with the database. Open it instead of creating a second one; a fresh install needs exactly one company edited properly, not twins. You will see fields for the company name, address, phone, email, website, tax ID, currency and logo. Work through them top to bottom rather than cherry-picking the pretty ones. One habit worth starting now: change one thing, save, look at the result. Odoo saves company changes instantly into every template that uses them, so a five-minute review after editing is the cheapest audit you will ever run.
Use the company's legal name here, not the friendly short name from your signboard, because this exact text prints on invoices and tax documents where the legal name is what auditors and customers' accounts departments match against payments. Enter the full registered address with city and PIN code, a phone number a customer can actually reach, and the business email you want replies to land in. Add your tax registration IDs in the tax ID field your country uses. These lines look like boring admin until the day a big customer's system rejects your invoice for a mismatched name or missing tax ID — then they look like the whole ballgame, because they were.
The company currency is set early and becomes the measuring stick for every price, invoice and report. Choose the currency your books are kept in — for most Indian offices, rupees. Odoo can still bill a foreign customer in their currency on a single invoice; that is a document-level choice. The company currency is different: it is the one your totals, dashboards and year-end numbers are expressed in. Changing it later, after real transactions exist, is painful and sometimes effectively impossible without rebuilding. If you genuinely trade in two currencies daily, say so to your accountant before setup, not after — this single dropdown has ended more ERP projects than any software bug.
Your country choice, made when the database was created and visible on the company, is Odoo quietly doing heavy lifting: when the accounting-side apps are installed, Odoo loads that country's localisation — a ready chart of accounts and standard tax templates (for India, the GST structure) instead of leaving you to invent them. Two duties remain yours. First, verify the tax rates against your actual registrations — templates are sensible defaults, not legal advice, and your accountant's word beats any software default. Second, keep product taxes consistent: each product carries a tax, and mixing them carelessly produces invoices your customers will query. Ten minutes with your accountant at this stage is the best money in the whole project.
Upload your company logo on the company record — a clean file with a transparent or white background, wide rather than tall. From this moment it appears on quotations, invoices, delivery documents and reports, which is most of the paper your business sends to the outside world. Print a test invoice to PDF and actually look at it: logo crisp, address complete, tax ID present, totals in the right currency. Also check the document layout settings if your version offers them — paper format and footer text live there, and the footer is a good home for bank details and payment terms. Businesses skip this review and discover the ugly version from a customer's screenshot. Be the business that discovers it from its own.
Before anyone adds a single customer, run this closing checklist:
That last option is the quietly professional one: many offices do a full rehearsal in a throwaway database, fix every embarrassment there, and only then start the real company database. An afternoon of rehearsal buys years of clean documents.
Watch the Odoo setup video to see where the company settings live right after installation, then walk this checklist with your own details.
▶️ Watch Full VideoFrom the company record in Settings. Upload the logo there once and Odoo places it on quotations, invoices, delivery notes and reports automatically. Use a clean, wide logo file and print a test invoice PDF to check how it looks before sending real documents.
It is very difficult once transactions exist, because every amount already recorded is expressed in the original currency. Choose the currency your books are kept in at setup time. Billing an individual foreign customer in their currency is still possible on that invoice without changing the company currency.
Partly. When accounting-side apps are installed, Odoo loads your country's localisation with a chart of accounts and standard tax templates, such as GST for India. Treat them as good defaults, not legal advice — have your accountant verify rates and accounts before the first real invoice.