OCR for Odoo: stop typing supplier invoices by hand
How EasyOCR turns supplier invoices and receipts into Odoo Community documents (16.0-20.0) without typing, and reads the digital PDF for free in your browser.
It is Monday morning, and before any reconciliation can happen, someone on your team has to do the least popular job in the office: typing supplier invoices into Odoo. Supplier name, invoice number, date, tax ID, line after line and tax after tax. One PDF, one form, all morning.
Odoo Community is a solid place to keep your books, but it has no native way to read a supplier invoice. If your team keys them in by hand, or lets them pile up until someone finds the time, that is the gap EasyOCR was built to close. This post covers what it does, what is free, and how to install it.
What EasyOCR does, and where it runs
EasyOCR is a module for Odoo built at EasySoft Tech S.L. You point it at a supplier invoice or a receipt — a PDF or a photo — and it creates the document inside Odoo: a vendor bill, or an employee expense if that is what the document is. It fills in the lines and the taxes, and matches the supplier by tax ID. No copy-paste, no second screen.
It runs on Odoo Community 16.0, 17.0, 18.0, 19.0 and 20.0, with one branch per series. It does not need Enterprise, and you do not have to buy another module to use it: its only dependencies are base, mail, account and hr_expense, which Community already includes. The module listing is on Odoo Apps, and the full picture is on OCR for Odoo.
One rectangle per field, remembered per supplier
In practice, this is what the flow feels like. You open the document in the viewer and draw a rectangle over each field: the amount, the invoice date, the invoice number, the tax ID. It is not a form to fill in; it is a box you drag with the mouse, and the text underneath is read instantly.
The second part is the one that pays off over time. Those rectangles are saved per supplier, so the next invoice from that supplier opens already marked: fields boxed, data pulled, and all you have to do is review and confirm. The first invoice from a supplier is the slow one. Every invoice after it is a couple of clicks.
What is free, and what needs the reading service
Two kinds of documents land in your inbox, and EasyOCR treats them differently.
A digital PDF — one that already carries text inside, like the ones most suppliers send by email — is read for free, in your browser. Nothing to configure, no service to hire: open it, box the fields, done.
Scans and photos are another story. They are images, so there is no text to pick up until something reads them, and that is exactly what the reading service is for. It is a separate service, and its plans are on EasyOCR. To be clear: a digital PDF needs nothing beyond your browser, while scans and phone photos go through the service.
The extras that remove the boring parts
- Batches: drop a folder of files and work through them one after another, instead of opening each document from scratch.
- Credit notes: a credit note is created as a vendor refund, so it does not land as a bill that someone has to fix by hand.
- Phone capture: photograph a receipt and send it into Odoo from your phone.
- Project assignment: send the expense to a project through its analytic account.
- Webhooks: get a notification when documents have been processed, so you can hook the flow into your own tools.
- Seven interface languages: Spanish, Catalan, Galician, German, French, Italian and Portuguese.
Installing it: unzip the folder and restart
Installation is deliberately boring. Download the ZIP from the GitHub releases page, unzip it into your Odoo addons folder, and restart Odoo. No external libraries to install on the server, nothing to compile. That is the entire procedure.
FAQ
Does it work with Odoo Community only?
Yes. EasyOCR runs on Community 16.0 to 20.0 and needs only base, mail, account and hr_expense. No Enterprise, no extra module to buy.
Does it read invoices photographed with a phone?
Yes, through the reading service. Digital PDFs that already contain text are read free in the browser, with no setup at all.
Do I have to draw the rectangles for every invoice?
No. You draw them once per supplier, and every later invoice from that supplier opens with the fields already marked.
Can it create employee expenses, not just vendor bills?
Yes. Receipts can become employee expenses inside Odoo. Like any photo or scan, they go through the reading service.
Which Odoo versions are supported?
16.0, 17.0, 18.0, 19.0 and 20.0. Each series has its own branch, so the code matches the version you run.
Where to go next
If you would like more background before installing anything, we wrote about automating invoice entry with OCR. Our OCR guide is only available in Spanish for now. And if your system is Dolibarr rather than Odoo, the same OCR exists for it: EasyOCR for Dolibarr. Installing EasyOCR takes less time than typing a single invoice by hand.