A Reckon to Odoo migration in Australia is the move from Reckon One, Reckon Accounts Hosted or Reckon Accounts Desktop onto Odoo’s all-in-one ERP — keeping your books, BAS lodgement and Single Touch Payroll continuity intact through cutover. For a typical small Australian business it takes six to twelve weeks. For mid-market with inventory or projects, three to six months.

The nine steps:

  1. Identify which Reckon product you’re on — the export path differs.
  2. Pick a cutover date aligned to your BAS quarter and STP pay cycle.
  3. Configure Odoo’s Australian localisation — GST chart, BAS report, Peppol.
  4. Export master data from Reckon — chart of accounts, contacts, items.
  5. Import contacts before any transactions.
  6. Import open invoices, open bills and inventory balances.
  7. Post opening trial balance journals against the cutover date.
  8. Switch bank feeds, ABA payments and Peppol invoicing.
  9. Parallel-run for three to five business days, sign off, go live.

The shape is the same as a Xero to Odoo migration or MYOB to Odoo migration; the wrinkles are Reckon-specific. We’re a Perth-based Odoo implementation consultancy, and the rest of this article is what we’ve actually learnt doing this work for Australian clients.

Why move from Reckon to Odoo

We worked with a Bunbury-based industrial supplies wholesaler who’d been on Reckon Accounts Hosted for nine years. Six users, A$11 million revenue, three warehouses tracked in spreadsheets nobody trusted past the third Monday of the month. Stock-on-hand reports lied. Their BAS reconciliation was a forty-hour ritual every quarter. The bookkeeper was about to retire and they couldn’t find a replacement who knew Reckon Accounts Hosted well enough to take it over.

That’s the story behind most Reckon migrations we see. Reckon Accounts Desktop and Hosted are mature platforms — stable, locally supported, well-loved by the bookkeepers who’ve used them for fifteen years. The trouble is they’re accounts engines. Once your business needs proper inventory across multiple sites, project-based job costing, an integrated CRM or a Peppol-ready invoicing path, you end up with three or four bolted-on tools and weekly reconciliation chores. Reckon One is cleaner and cloud-native, but at five-plus users with inventory the licensing maths usually loses to Odoo on a three-year view.

Odoo replaces five or six of those tools with one database. That’s the case to make to the board. An Australian SME pays roughly A$34 per user per month for all apps, plus a one-off implementation fee in the A$25,000 to A$80,000 range. Our Bunbury client retired Reckon Accounts Hosted, two inventory spreadsheets, a standalone CRM and a Peppol intermediary in the same go-live. Quarterly BAS reconciliation went from forty hours to under five.

Reckon One vs Accounts Hosted vs Accounts Desktop — which version you’re migrating from

The three Reckon products look related; the export paths and migration risks are very different. Identify which one you’re on before scoping anything else, because what’s possible to bring across — and how cleanly — varies widely.

Reckon One

Reckon One is the cloud product. It exports CSV reports cleanly and exposes an API. You can pull the chart of accounts, contacts, items, open invoices, open bills, recent journal lines and bank feeds with reliable structure, which means most of the migration is unattended scripting against Odoo’s import templates. We treat Reckon One migrations as broadly comparable to a Xero migration on effort — three to six weeks for a small business with light inventory, longer if there’s payroll history that needs preserving.

Reckon Accounts Hosted

Reckon Accounts Hosted is the Citrix-delivered desktop product running on Reckon’s servers. The data model is Reckon Accounts under the hood — rich, transactional, but designed for printed-report extraction rather than API export. We pull data via the IIF export, IIF import format, and Excel-flavoured CSVs from inside the hosted session. Customer and supplier lists come out cleanly. Inventory items come out with quirks around units of measure and assemblies. GST tax codes need a manual translation table to Odoo’s BAS-aligned tax codes; Reckon’s GST handling, while ATO-compliant, doesn’t map one-for-one to Odoo’s localisation.

Reckon Accounts Desktop

Reckon Accounts Desktop sits on a local PC or server. The export tooling is the same as Hosted, but you also have the option of running a third-party extraction tool against the QBW-flavoured database directly. Older versions (pre-2019) sometimes carry rounding artefacts in the GL, which we surface during reconciliation rather than during cutover — fixing them after the fact is fine, dragging them into Odoo and trusting them is not.

BAS, STP Phase 2 and Peppol cutover during the migration window

The compliance handover is where Reckon migrations go wrong. Most Australian SMEs lodge BAS quarterly, run STP Phase 2 fortnightly or monthly, and increasingly send Peppol invoices to Commonwealth and state agencies. Three independent compliance tracks have to keep running through a ledger swap. Plan each track separately or you’ll discover gaps two days before go-live.

BAS cutover

Cut over on day one of a new BAS quarter. The previous quarter lodges out of Reckon, the next quarter starts in Odoo. Splitting a BAS period across two ledgers is technically possible but creates a fortnight of GST reconciliation work nobody pays you for. Odoo’s BAS report — Types A, C and D — generates from the GST chart correctly once the Australian localisation is configured; we always run a dummy BAS in UAT before signing off cutover so we know the tax codes have mapped properly.

STP Phase 2 handover

If your payroll is in Reckon Payroll Premier or Reckon Payroll, plan the STP Phase 2 handover as a separate cutover with its own date. Most of our Reckon clients move to Employment Hero or KeyPay alongside Odoo’s Australian payroll because the dedicated payroll engines interpret Fair Work modern awards more cleanly than Odoo does natively. The clean sequence is: finish the current pay cycle in Reckon, finalise the YTD STP submission, then start the next pay cycle in the new payroll tool, and feed Odoo’s GL via journal export rather than running pay runs natively.

Peppol turn-on

If you’re not already on Peppol, register your ABN with the ATO’s Peppol service while implementation runs, and turn it on in Odoo on go-live day. Odoo ships native Peppol BIS Billing 3.0; you don’t need a third-party intermediary unless you’ve already got a relationship with one. Sending a Peppol invoice to a Commonwealth agency on day one of the new ledger is a cheap, visible signal to the team that the new system actually works.

Cost and timeline for a Reckon to Odoo migration

Numbers people ask for first, in plain Australian dollars. The honest answer depends on which Reckon product, how much history you bring, how many modules you turn on, and whether payroll is in scope.

Cost ranges

For a small business — five to fifteen users, accounting plus CRM plus light inventory, no payroll in Odoo — partner fees typically land between A$25,000 and A$45,000. Mid-market migrations with multi-warehouse inventory, projects or field service usually run A$45,000 to A$90,000. Above that sits a fuller scope — manufacturing, multi-entity, Employment Hero or KeyPay integration, custom workflows — at A$90,000 to A$180,000. Odoo licensing is separate, billed in AUD per active user per month, and starts around A$34 for all apps on the Standard plan.

Timeline ranges

Six to twelve weeks for a small business on Reckon One with clean data. Twelve to twenty weeks for Reckon Accounts Hosted with inventory and a payroll handover. Three to six months for mid-market with multi-warehouse, projects or manufacturing. Anything advertised as “Reckon to Odoo in two weeks” is either a one-user Reckon One trial or work you’ll redo within the year. Our implementation timeline article walks the phases in detail.

What drives both

Three things: data hygiene, scope discipline and decision speed. Clean Reckon data — contacts deduplicated, items rationalised, GL reconciled — saves a fortnight. Disciplined scope — agreeing what’s in version one and what’s in version two — saves another. Decisions made in the meeting, not a week later via email, save the third. Two of the three sit on the client side, which is why our implementation method puts the discovery and scope phase ahead of any configuration.

Parallel run, opening trial balance and reconciliation

Cutover is one day; reconciliation is the discipline that makes that day stick. Three artefacts have to line up before sign-off: an opening trial balance posted at the cutover date, a parallel-run log proving Odoo and Reckon agree for the trial period, and a signed UAT acceptance from the finance lead.

Opening trial balance

Take the trial balance out of Reckon at end of business on cutover day. Post it to Odoo as a single opening balance journal against the same date. Every account ties: bank, debtors, creditors, GST clearing, retained earnings. If a balance doesn’t tie to the cent, find out why before you go further; tiny discrepancies hide rounding errors that compound across hundreds of subsequent transactions.

Parallel window

Three to five business days. During the parallel window, every new sale, purchase and payment is entered in both systems by the same person. At end of day, run the bank reconciliation in Odoo and compare the cash position to Reckon. If they agree for three consecutive days, you’re done. If they don’t, fix the gap and start the count over.

Sign-off criteria

Make the criteria objective and agreed in writing before the parallel window starts. We use four: trial balance matches at cutover; bank balance matches each day of the parallel run; GST clearing balance matches end of parallel; debtors and creditors aged listings match within a defined tolerance. Sign-off is the finance lead’s call, not the consultant’s.

Why pick a partner with Australian context

Migrations break on three things: the Australian localisation, the data and the change. Two of those are Australian-specific. Odoo is a Belgian platform with a global codebase; the Australian localisation pack covers GST, BAS, ABA, Peppol and TPAR competently, but configuring it for a specific business — your industry rules, your bank, your payroll engine — is what turns a generic install into a working ledger.

We work in Perth and across Australia. Our consultants know the ATO’s BAS types, the Australian banks’ ABA quirks (ANZ, NAB, CBA and Westpac handle the format slightly differently in practice), the Fair Work modern award traps, and the carriers your warehouse staff already use — Australia Post, StarTrack and Starshipit. None of that sits on a global Odoo partner’s standard checklist. If you’re choosing between Reckon, Xero and Odoo for the next five years, the partner question matters at least as much as the platform one.

If you’re sizing up a move from Reckon Accounts Hosted, Reckon One or Reckon Accounts Desktop and want a frank conversation about scope, timing and cost, we run an obligation-free discovery call before any quoting starts. We’ll tell you whether the migration is straightforward or has gotchas, and what a sensible first phase looks like.

Frequently asked.

Can I use Odoo in Australia?

Yes. Odoo runs natively in Australia with an ATO-aligned chart of accounts, BAS-ready GST handling, ABA bank file generation, TPAR support and native Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 e-invoicing. Odoo S.A. has a Sydney office and an accredited partner network, and Australian customers can host on Odoo Online, Odoo.sh in Sydney, or self-host on AWS Sydney or Azure Australia East.

How much does Reckon hosted cost?

Reckon Accounts Hosted is around A$70 to A$120 per user per month at list price, billed annually, depending on edition and add-ons like Payroll Premier. A typical five-user Australian business pays roughly A$5,000 to A$8,000 per year in Reckon Hosted licence fees alone, before bookkeeper time and any third-party tools bolted on.

What is the difference between Odoo and Xero Australia?

Xero is a focused cloud accounting platform for small businesses. Odoo is a full ERP that runs accounting, inventory, manufacturing, projects, CRM and field service on one database. For Australian businesses under fifteen users with no inventory or project complexity, Xero is usually faster to operate. Once a second or third operational system enters the stack, Odoo typically wins on cost and clarity.

How do I sync my bank account with Odoo?

Odoo connects to ANZ, NAB, CBA, Westpac and most other Australian banks via direct feeds through Odoo's bank synchronisation service. For outbound payments, Odoo generates ABA files that you upload to your bank's portal. CSV imports are the fallback for any institution without a direct feed. Reconciliation runs against the live feed inside Odoo's accounting module.

Is Odoo better than Xero?

Better at different jobs. Xero is cleaner as a pure-play accounting platform for small businesses without inventory, manufacturing or project complexity. Odoo wins once you need accounting plus inventory, projects, CRM or field service on one database. The honest test is whether accounting is the whole job or part of it — Reckon users moving up usually need more than just an accounts engine.

What is the 200 day rule in Australia?

The 200-day rule refers to the ATO's general residency test for individuals — broadly, an individual present in Australia for 183 days or more in a financial year is treated as a tax resident. It is not directly relevant to a Reckon to Odoo migration, but it does come up when configuring payroll for staff who travel between Australia and other markets, where the residency status drives PAYG withholding.