Odoo and JIM2 solve overlapping problems for very different audiences. JIM2 Business Engine, built by Sydney-based Happen Business, is a mature Australian-built business management system favoured by IT resellers, electrical wholesalers, security installers and managed service providers. Odoo is a modular open-source ERP with an Australian localisation covering GST, BAS Types A, C and D, STP Phase 2 and Peppol e-invoicing. The honest choice between them comes down to how Australian-specific your workflow is, how much customisation you’ll need over the next five years, and what you’re prepared to pay per user.
We worked with a Perth electrical wholesaler on this exact decision earlier this year. Eleven users, JIM2 since 2014, 8,000 SKUs across two warehouses, an ageing on-premise server, and a partner who’d retired. Every quarter, BAS reconciliation cost two staff half a day because the GST coding for landed imports didn’t match how the ATO wanted it shown. They asked us to scope a move to Odoo. We told them what most consultancies won’t: if JIM2 still ran their workflow and the partner question could be solved, the cheapest answer was to stay. It couldn’t, so we migrated them. Six months later their stock count was right for the first time in three years.
Odoo vs JIM2 at a glance
| Dimension | JIM2 Business Engine | Odoo |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Sydney, Australia (Happen Business, est. 1996) | Belgium, open-source, annual release |
| Best fit user count | 5–50 | 5–500+ |
| Indicative starting cost (AUD) | ~$150 per user per month | ~$34 per user per month (all apps) |
| Deployment | On-premise or hosted | Online, Odoo.sh, or self-hosted |
| GST, BAS, STP Phase 2 | ✓ Native and Australian-built | ✓ Via Australian localisation module |
| Peppol e-invoicing | ⚠ Add-on / partner integration | ✓ Via registered Access Point |
| Inventory and warehousing | ✓ Strong — its core strength | ✓ Strong — barcode, lots, landed costs |
| Manufacturing (MRP) | Light assembly | ✓ Full BOMs, routings, subcontracting |
| CRM, project, eCommerce, HR | Light or absent | ✓ First-class native modules |
| Customisation ceiling | Reports and forms via JIM2 tools | Studio, Python, full open-source code |
| Partner ecosystem | Small — Happen Business and a handful of resellers | Large — global plus Australian specialists |
| Mobile and remote access | Limited — web companion app | Native responsive web and mobile apps |
Rule of thumb: if your business looks like every other JIM2 customer (an Australian wholesaler or IT reseller running serial-tracked stock), JIM2 still does that job well. If your business needs JIM2 plus four other systems to function, Odoo replaces all five.
What JIM2 is and who it suits
JIM2 Business Engine is a Windows-based business management system built specifically for the Australian SME market by Happen Business in Sydney. It started as a stockroom and invoicing tool for IT distributors in the late 1990s and has grown into a connected platform covering quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, stock, service jobs, debtors and creditors. Its core strength is serial-number and asset tracking for resellers — every laptop, switch or alarm panel that moves through the business is traceable from purchase through invoicing to warranty.
The customer base is concentrated in Australian wholesale and field service: IT resellers and managed service providers, electrical and security wholesalers, audiovisual installers, locksmiths and trade suppliers. If your business sells, services and warranties physical goods to other businesses in Australia, JIM2 was built for you. Its BAS, GST coding, ABA file generation, and supplier price-list import workflows assume Australian conditions.
The trade-off is breadth. JIM2 was never built to be your CRM marketing platform, your project costing engine, your manufacturing MRP or your eCommerce front end. Those are bolt-on integrations or separate systems. The wholesaler above ran JIM2 plus HubSpot plus a paper service book plus a Shopify store with no inventory sync. JIM2 did its job; the rest was duct tape.
What Odoo is and who it suits
Odoo is an open-source ERP founded in Belgium in 2005 with annual major releases and an Australian partner ecosystem. The Australian localisation module ships GST rate handling, BAS Types A, C and D, STP Phase 2 payroll lodgement, Peppol e-invoicing under BIS Billing 3.0, and ABA file generation for ANZ, CBA, NAB and Westpac. Beyond accounting, the platform includes over sixty official modules — CRM, sales, purchase, inventory, manufacturing, project, timesheets, field service, helpdesk, eCommerce, marketing, HR and recruitment — sharing one database, one user model and one set of reports.
Odoo’s strongest fit is the Australian business that has outgrown Xero or MYOB but isn’t large enough or homogeneous enough for NetSuite. Five to two hundred users, multiple operational domains under one roof, and a finance team that wants the data the operations team is creating without re-keying anything. We see this most often in wholesale, manufacturing, professional services, field service and growing eCommerce.
The Odoo trade-off runs the other way. You don’t buy Odoo to do one thing well — you buy it because one platform replaces three to seven. That depth needs a competent implementation. Self-served Odoo past five users tends to produce cluttered systems nobody trusts. With a proper Australian implementation partner the platform consolidates, but the entry effort is higher than turning on a JIM2 licence.
Pricing and total cost of ownership
JIM2 is licensed per concurrent user and historically priced around $150 AUD per user per month for a hosted setup, with a meaningful upfront fee for on-premise installs. Features come in the box, but integrations to anything outside JIM2 — eCommerce, payroll, CRM, freight — usually need a custom build by Happen or a reseller. A typical 15-user JIM2 deployment with hosting, reports work and an integration or two lands between $35,000 and $80,000 AUD over three years on our scoping desk.
Odoo Enterprise is around $34 AUD per user per month for all apps on Odoo Online, with implementation as a separate one-off cost. A 15-user Odoo deployment scoped properly — Accounting, Inventory, Sales, Purchase, CRM, Project, Studio, Australian localisation, two integrations, training, data migration — typically lands between $40,000 and $90,000 AUD over three years including licensing. The licence is cheaper; the implementation is similar; the addressable scope is much wider. We break this down in Odoo implementation cost in Australia.
The cost question isn’t licence-versus-licence. It’s how many systems each replaces. A JIM2 customer running JIM2 + Xero + HubSpot + Shopify pays four subscriptions and integrates them imperfectly. The same business on Odoo pays one subscription and one implementation.
Australian compliance: BAS, STP Phase 2, Peppol
Both platforms handle Australian compliance, but they handle it differently.
JIM2 has Australian compliance built in. GST coding follows ATO labels by default, BAS is generated against the same data receivables enter, and ABA files generate for ANZ, NAB, CBA and Westpac without extra configuration. STP Phase 2 payroll is supported via Happen’s payroll integration or a paired payroll product. This is JIM2’s home court.
Odoo’s Australian localisation has matured fast. BAS Types A, C and D generate from the same chart of accounts you use day-to-day, STP Phase 2 lodges through an SBR-registered gateway, ABA files generate for the big four banks, and Peppol e-invoicing runs natively through registered Access Points like Storecove and Link4. We’ve covered this at Odoo Peppol e-invoicing and Australian payroll fit.
The substantive difference is Peppol. Odoo is ahead — native sending and receiving of compliant e-invoices is built into the standard product. JIM2 reaches Peppol through partner integrations. For wholesalers selling to Australian government and large enterprise buyers that mandate Peppol, this is starting to matter. For everyone else it doesn’t yet — but it will within two BAS cycles.
Industry fit: wholesale, IT services, trades
JIM2’s wheelhouse is Australian B2B distribution with serial-tracked stock and service-job overlays. IT resellers selling hardware with on-site installs, electrical wholesalers with branch counters and trade accounts, security and AV installers with warranty registers — JIM2 was built for these workflows and the language of the product reflects them.
Odoo’s footprint is broader. The same Odoo database supports a manufacturer with BOMs and routings, a wholesaler with multi-warehouse inventory, a construction subcontractor with TPAR-aware job costing, a field service operator running recurring jobs, and an eCommerce brand with a public website — sometimes all five inside one parent group. The cost of that flexibility is configuration. Out of the box, Odoo is generic; configured well for Australian wholesale, it’s at least as capable as JIM2 with a much wider ceiling.
If you run a pure Australian wholesaler with twelve users, no manufacturing, no projects and no eCommerce, the JIM2 path is shorter. If any of those four needs is real or coming, Odoo extends without bolt-ons.
Implementation and partner ecosystem
JIM2 is sold and implemented by Happen Business directly and a small network of partner resellers, almost all Australian. The benefit is consistency. The downside is concentration: if your reseller retires (as the Perth wholesaler’s did), options narrow quickly, and customisation depth depends on Happen’s roadmap.
Odoo’s partner ecosystem is larger and global, with an Australian layer of specialist consultancies. That breadth cuts both ways: more partners means more choice, but also more variability in quality. A bad Odoo partner produces a worse outcome than a competent JIM2 reseller. Picking the right implementation method is the single biggest variable in Odoo total cost of ownership.
Both platforms reward continuity. The businesses that win on either system pick a partner they trust and stay with them across at least two annual upgrade cycles.
Customisation ceiling: JIM2 reports vs Odoo Studio
JIM2 exposes report writing and form customisation through its built-in tools, with deeper changes routed through Happen as custom development. For most Australian wholesalers that ceiling is high enough — sales reports, stock valuations, GP analyses and ABA file tweaks are within reach. Where it breaks down is structural change: adding a business unit with different workflows, a new sales channel with different pricing rules, or a compliance regime JIM2’s data model wasn’t built for.
Odoo’s ceiling is much higher. Odoo Studio gives non-developers a drag-and-drop interface to add fields, rearrange forms, build approval workflows, generate PDFs and define automated actions without touching code. Past Studio, the source is open: any business with development capacity can extend Odoo at the Python level and ship private modules through the same release pipeline as the core product.
This isn’t theoretical. The Perth wholesaler needed a return-merchandise workflow tied to a serial number, a credit note and a supplier RMA — three modules talking to each other. In JIM2 that would have been a custom build. In Odoo it was four Studio fields, one automated action and a custom report — built in two days.
Hidden costs of staying on JIM2 vs moving to Odoo
Both directions carry costs that don’t show up in a vendor quote. Staying on JIM2 looks cheap because the licence is paid and the workflow works, but the surrounding stack drains margin quietly. The bookkeeper exports JIM2 data into Excel for director reports; marketing pays for HubSpot and re-keys customers; eCommerce sells stock JIM2 doesn’t know about; the field tech updates a paper job sheet someone re-enters at the office. Each is twenty minutes a day. Twenty minutes a day across eight staff is fifteen hours a week, or roughly $50,000 AUD a year in loaded labour.
Moving to Odoo has visible costs — implementation, training, a quarter or two of slower throughput — but it removes the duct tape. Customers we’ve migrated typically free one to two roles’ worth of administrative time in the first year, which pays for the implementation before the second BAS cycle closes.
The honest version: stay on JIM2 if your stack is JIM2 and one thing else. Move to Odoo if it’s JIM2 and four things else.
When JIM2 still wins (the honest cases)
We don’t tell every JIM2 user to move. Three situations where JIM2 is still the right answer:
You’re a focused Australian B2B wholesaler with mature JIM2 reports, a healthy reseller relationship, no manufacturing, no project costing, no eCommerce, and no plan to add them. The system fits your business precisely; switching costs would buy you flexibility you’ll never use.
You’re under ten users, profitable, and your team knows JIM2 cold. The disruption of an ERP migration in a small, stable business with no growth pressure is rarely worth the marginal feature gain. We’ve talked operators out of this exact migration twice this year.
You’re in the middle of another transformation — new warehouse, new ownership, ERP-grade compliance work — and adding a system migration on top would overload the team. Sequence matters. Sometimes the right move is to stabilise on JIM2 for twelve months, then revisit.
These are real cases, not hedges. The point of a partner is to tell you when not to spend money.
Migrating off JIM2: data, opening balances, cutover
When a JIM2 to Odoo migration is the right call, the work is reasonably well-defined. We extract customers, suppliers, items, serial-tracked stock, open orders, debtors, creditors and a year of transactional history from JIM2 via CSV exports and ODBC where available. We map JIM2’s chart of accounts to the Australian localisation chart in Odoo, reconcile GST balances to the prior BAS, and run a parallel quarter before cutover.
The trickiest pieces are serial-number history (Odoo handles serials natively, but the historical detail in JIM2 doesn’t always map cleanly), supplier price lists with quantity breaks, and any custom JIM2 reports that have become load-bearing. We rebuild those reports in Odoo Studio or as custom QWeb reports before go-live. BAS cutover is timed to a quarter boundary so the ATO sees one platform per period.
Done properly it takes eight to fourteen weeks for a 15-user JIM2 business. Done badly it takes a year. The variable is scope discipline and partner experience, not the platform.
Making the call
JIM2 is a competent, Australian-built system that fits a specific kind of business. Odoo is broader and more configurable, and the gap widens the further you get from pure B2B wholesale. Both run Australian compliance correctly. Only one has a ceiling high enough to absorb the next five years of your operations.
If you’re weighing the move — or weighing whether the move is right at all — we’d rather have a one-hour conversation about your current stack than send you a deck. Book a chat about your fit and we’ll tell you honestly which side of the line your business sits on.
Frequently asked.
Is Odoo used in Australia?
Yes. Odoo runs thousands of Australian businesses across wholesale, IT services, trades, manufacturing, retail and professional services. The Australian localisation covers GST, BAS Types A, C and D, STP Phase 2, Peppol e-invoicing under BIS Billing 3.0, and ABA file generation for ANZ, NAB, CBA and Westpac. It's less name-recognised than MYOB or Xero but materially deeper past the accounting layer.
Which accounting software is mostly used in Australia?
Xero and MYOB lead the SME accounting tier by customer count, with QuickBooks and Reckon further back. Neither Xero nor MYOB is a full ERP. JIM2, Odoo, NetSuite, SAP Business One and MYOB Acumatica compete in the Australian mid-market where accounting plus operations need to share one database. The right answer depends on whether accounting is the whole job or part of it.
What is the difference between Odoo and Xero Australia?
Xero is Australian cloud accounting — invoicing, bank feeds, BAS and STP Phase 2 payroll. Odoo is a modular ERP with the same Australian compliance plus inventory, manufacturing, CRM, projects, field service, eCommerce and HR sharing one database. Xero wins for sole traders and small finance teams; Odoo wins once operations needs the same data the accountant uses.
Do big companies use Odoo?
Odoo's strongest fit is the five-to-five-hundred user band, but it also runs operations for ASX-listed and multi-entity organisations using Odoo Enterprise on Odoo.sh or self-hosted. The platform handles multi-company, multi-currency, multi-warehouse and inter-company invoicing out of the box. Above five hundred users it competes against NetSuite and SAP rather than against JIM2 or Xero.
What is the best CRM in Australia?
There's no single answer — HubSpot dominates marketing-led teams, Salesforce dominates enterprise sales, and Zoho serves cost-conscious SMEs. For Australian businesses that want CRM, quoting, sales orders and accounting in one database, Odoo CRM is the strongest fit because the quote a salesperson sends becomes the invoice the bookkeeper reconciles without re-keying.