The company: Who is Vergo?
Vergo develops, renovates, and sells energy-efficient homes across Flanders. The family business has done it for more than twenty years, and it does not work alone. Thomas and Jana share a back office with two sister companies. One of them, Persé, carries out the building work and bills it onward. Invoices move between the companies all the time.
That structure is normal for a property group. It is also where the accounting gets hard. When one company does the work and bills it to another, the cost has to land on the right project, in the right category, without losing the detail on the way. Do that across dozens of renovation projects and three legal entities, and a spreadsheet stops holding up.
ODILA rebuilt Vergo's back office in Odoo to solve that.
"Working with Mattis went flawlessly. Always easy to reach, and he knew his stuff." - Thomas
The problem: profit hides between the companies
A renovation project breaks into dozens of costs: a kitchen, a roof, rough construction, finishing, each with its own supplier and its own price. For Vergo, many of those costs do not arrive directly. Persé carries out work and invoices it on to Vergo.
Two questions are easy to ask and hard to answer in that setup:
- What did this specific project cost us, line by line?
- Of that cost, how much came from the sister company and how much from outside suppliers?
Without a system built around the project, the answers live in someone's head or in a spreadsheet. Margin becomes a number you confirm after the project closes, when it is too late to do anything about it.
The solution: one database built around the project
ODILA put Vergo, Persé, and Lugoe into a single multi-company Odoo database. Users switch between companies from one dropdown, and each company's data stays separate where it has to. This also made it possible to get an overview of the financials of the different companies combined.
Analytic accounting per project. Every project gets its own analytic account. Each invoice line carries a category label, such as rough construction or kitchen. Cost attaches to the project the moment someone books it.
Reusable project templates. A new renovation starts from a template that already holds its analytic structure. The team stops rebuilding the same scaffolding every time.
A reinvoicing workflow between the sister companies. When Persé bills work onward to Vergo, the workflow keeps every line intact. ODILA added two custom fields that track which lines have been passed on and flag when an incoming invoice is fully reinvoiced. The invoices travel between the companies over Peppol, so the line-level detail survives the handover instead of collapsing into one PDF total.
A live margin dashboard. The "Actual Margins" report shows cost per project, per category, per company. In Vergo's view it also groups by partner, so the team sees at a glance how much of a project's cost came from the sister company versus real external suppliers. But also what costs in the sister companie Persé came from outside work and suppliers.
ODILA also pre-loaded the asset and depreciation tables, last years balance sheet, switched on Peppol for incoming invoices, and closed the project with training built around how Vergo actually works rather than a generic Odoo manual.
"Odoo is very user-friendly, and Mattis's training was very clear." - Jana
The result
Vergo now sees the margin on a project while the project is still running. The reinvoicing between the two companies is easy and keeps its detail, so both sides assign costs to the right project. Three companies run from one environment instead of three disconnected ones.
A system like this is only as good as what goes into it. Clean margin reporting depends on each line getting the right project, label, and company at entry. ODILA built the structure so the correct choice is the easy one, and the training to keep it that way.
What other property groups can take from this
If you run more than one company and your projects share costs, three things matter more than which software you pick:
- Attach cost to the project at entry, not at close. Analytic accounting per project turns margin from a post-mortem into a live number you can still act on.
- Keep line-level detail when you bill between companies. A single lump-sum invoice between sister entities throws away the information you need to judge a project. A proper reinvoicing flow over Peppol keeps it.
- Separate internal cost from external cost. Knowing how much of a project came from inside your own group changes how you read its margin.
Vergo got those three right first, which is why the numbers on its dashboard actually mean something.
Asked whether they would recommend ODILA: "Absolutely, without a doubt." - Thomas
Want this for your business? ODILA builds Odoo implementations for Belgian construction businesses, tailored to how your company actually runs. Give us a call and we'll see how we can help you.