account_onboarding

Setting up accounting is a sequence: company details, bank account, chart of accounts, first invoice. Odoo tracks that sequence as onboarding steps and shows them on the accounting dashboard.

This widget draws that panel. What makes it worth reading is where the data comes from: not a query of its own, but a JSON string already sitting on the journal record as part of its dashboard payload.

Clicking a step calls whatever action that step names, with the journal supplied as context, and opens whatever comes back.

Onboarding checklists are one of the few interface patterns with a measurable effect on whether a system gets used. The accounting one matters more than most, because a half-configured chart of accounts is worse than none.

For an implementation, the steps are worth walking even when you know the product, because they are also what the dashboard uses to decide the account is ready. Skipping them leaves the panel visible for months.

Placing it

<widget name="account_onboarding"/>

No attributes. The steps come from the record.

Where the steps live

JSON.parse(record.kanban_dashboard).onboarding.steps

A payload already loaded for the dashboard.

What a click sends

onboarding.onboarding.step[step.action](
  context: { journal_id: record id }
)

Then the returned action is opened.

The parse is the design decision worth noting. The accounting dashboard already loads a payload per journal describing everything the card shows, and the onboarding steps ride along inside it. Reading them from there costs nothing, where a separate query would cost one per journal.

The trade is fragility. The getter parses the string every time it is read and reaches into a nested property, so a payload that is malformed or missing the onboarding section produces an error rather than an empty panel.

The click handler is the other half. Each step carries the name of a server method, and the handler calls that method on the onboarding step model with the journal identifier in context. Passing the journal is what lets a generic step know which journal it is completing.

Whatever the method returns is then opened as an action, which is how a step link becomes a setup wizard or a form.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The development branch is unstable and this may still change; we re-verify this page after the release.

Byte-identical. The file on the development branch matches Odoo 19 exactly, including the payload parse and the context passed to the step action.