Gentrepreneur runs a programme, 'The Company' where students start and run real companies. Real invoices, real VAT, real customers, not simulations on paper. Each student company keeps its own books. Behind them, a small team of coaches keeps the whole thing on the rails. They run the payments and file the VAT.
The programme grows and changes. Members join, members move on. That is the whole point of it, and it is also where the accounting gets hard. You end up with many separate sets of books that all have to live in one place, stay walled off from each other, and still roll up into one overview (that not just anyone can acces). And every time a new member joins, someone has to build a clean, correct company from scratch.
We are actually kinda proud that we had the opportunity of setting this up.
"Smooth, accessible and fast, during the training phase too, and no doubt in the aftercare as well." - a coach at Gentrepreneur
Many companies in one place, nothing allowed to leak
A programme like this asks four things from its accounting at once:
- Each member needs real, separate books, their own overviews and their own Peppol invoices, not a shared ledger.
- No student can see another member's data, or touch the official filings.
- The coaches need one consolidated view across everyone.
- A new member has to be set up fast and correctly, every cycle.
Do that by hand and it eats the coaches' time and breaks in every way. A wrong setting on a new company, and the consolidation no longer adds up.
One database, one company per member
ODILA put every member into a single multi-company Odoo database, each as its own company, and built the structure around how the programme actually runs.
A company per member, walled off. Each member has its own company in the database. Users get access to their own company only. A student sees their own accounting and nobody else's. This also makes that the students now actually have an insight into their own numbers.
Consolidated reporting across the group. The company-group report shows a column per member and a total column, so the coaches read the whole programme at a glance. Interim figures are there whenever they look, with no wait for a close.
A repeatable onboarding for each new member. Adding a member is a fixed five-step routine: create the company, import the programmes chart of accounts, merge the accounts so they consolidate correctly, add the member's document folder, and create a restricted user. What used to be a build from scratch is now a checklist.
Documents and Peppol wired in. All of the invoices end up in the central company, Gentrepreneur itself. After that, the coaches just simply assign the invoice to the right student and they can process the invoice in their accounting.
A split that students cannot break. Members do the daily work: entering supplier invoices, raising sales invoices, preparing SEPA payments. The coaches handle the payment runs and every periodic VAT and tax filing. That division sits in the access rights, so the risky buttons are not even reachable for a student.
Working within a one-app Odoo licence (which is a free licence btw), ODILA also set up the customer and supplier overviews straight from Accounting and kept sales invoicing there too, so the programme runs lean.
"Mattis is always reachable and happy to think through solutions with you and explain how things work." - a coach at Gentrepreneur
The result
Gentrepreneur now runs many real companies from one system. Each student keeps clean, separate books. The coaches see the whole group in a single report and keep the filings right. A new member goes live in minutes instead of an afternoon of setup.
A system like this is only as good as what goes into it. Clean consolidation depends on every member being set up the same correct way. ODILA built the onboarding so the correct way is the easy way, and trained the coaches to run it themselves.
What other programmes can take from this
If you manage many companies or members under one roof, three choices matter more than the software you pick:
- Give every member its own company, not a shared ledger. Real separation keeps each set of books honest and the access clean.
- Make onboarding a checklist, not a project. If you add members regularly, the setup has to be repeatable, or it becomes your bottleneck.
- Put who-does-what into the access rights. Let members do the daily entry and lock the official filings to the people responsible. The system enforces it, so nobody has to police it.
Gentrepreneur can take on the next member without thinking about the plumbing, which is the whole point.
Asked whether they would recommend ODILA: "Yes, definitely." — a coach at Gentrepreneur
Want this for your organisation?
ODILA builds Odoo implementations for Belgian organisations, tailored to how you actually work This is an example of a service & events based business, but we also focus on other sectors. Click here to find out more about that. Give us a call and we'll see how we can help you.