bill_upload_guide

The first vendor bill is the hardest one, because the question is not how to fill the form but how bills are supposed to arrive at all. Odoo supports three answers: drop the file in, forward the email to an alias, or type it by hand.

This widget puts all three in one panel, at the point where someone is looking at an empty bill list. It embeds the shared document uploader for the first, surfaces the journal's alias for the second, and links to a blank form for the third.

It also offers a sample bill, but only after asking the server whether one is available.

How bills arrive determines how much of accounts payable is manual forever. The email alias is usually the right answer for a business with recurring suppliers, because it removes the step where a human decides to upload something.

Setting the alias up is a small task that pays continuously, and the fact that this panel shows it prominently is a hint about how Odoo expects the process to work.

Placing it

<widget name="bill_upload_guide"/>

No attributes. It adapts to whether a record is present.

The type it derives

sale      -> customer invoice
purchase  -> vendor bill
otherwise -> journal entry

From the journal's own type.

The alias

# shown only when the journal has an alias domain

Otherwise that path is hidden.

The setup work happens before the first render, and it splits on whether a record is available.

With a journal record, the widget builds a context naming the journal as the default, deriving the default document type from the journal's type, and setting the journal as the active record. That derivation is a three-way choice: a sales journal produces a customer invoice, a purchase journal a vendor bill, and anything else a plain journal entry.

Without a record, which happens when the panel sits in a filtered list rather than on a journal card, it falls back to the search context and carries only the active identifier through as the default journal. That is a narrower context, and it is why the panel offers slightly less in that position.

The alias is read from the journal and only surfaced when an alias domain is configured, so an unconfigured database does not advertise an address that does not work.

Finally, the sample bill option is gated behind a server call asking whether a sample is available, which keeps the offer out of databases where it would fail.

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.

Reworked. The development branch changes the component alongside the wider accounting onboarding rework. The three paths, upload, email and manual, are what to expect to survive.