Initial situation of the customer
NextLink Group is a Swiss-based technology company delivering custom software development, IT consulting, and cloud solutions to businesses worldwide. With offices across Europe and beyond — including Spain, the UK, Czech Republic, India, Germany, and France — NextLink operates at scale, serving a large and continuously growing international customer base.
As the company expanded, so did the complexity of its operations. What once worked on spreadsheets quickly became a bottleneck standing in the way of growth.
The challenge
Despite its international footprint, NextLink was running core business processes on Excel and local accounting software — one system per country, with no central oversight.
The result? Three critical bottlenecks:
- No unified CRM or HR system: Business data lived in disconnected Excel tables. Every update had to be entered manually, and managers needed multiple spreadsheets just to get a basic overview of ongoing deals and resources.
- Manual contract management at scale: With approximately 350 contracts per year to manage, the team had to track expiration dates, calculate rates, report time, and create employee contracts by hand. The process was slow, error-prone, and demanded constant double-checking.
- Complex multi-country invoicing: With subsidiaries across several countries, accountants had to manually compile time-tracked data and generate between 1,500 and 2,500 invoices per year. Delivering invoices on time was a constant struggle.
The status quo was no longer sustainable. NextLink needed a single, scalable platform to bring everything together.
The success
NextLink partnered with VentorTech to design and implement a tailored Odoo solution. The engagement began with several days of in-depth workshops to map NextLink's existing workflows and identify the highest-impact areas for automation. From there, a phased implementation roadmap was developed, covering CRM, Sales, Timesheets, Invoicing, Supplier Payments, and General Settings.
Three core solutions addressed NextLink's biggest pain points:
- Custom Contract Management Wizard The standard Odoo workflow for contract creation involved multiple steps across different modules — a process that took 15 minutes or more per contract. A custom wizard was developed that consolidates the entire process into a single window. With one input, the system automatically generates the product, sales order, employee profile, contract, rates, project, and tasks simultaneously. What once took 15 minutes now takes less than a minute.
- Integrated Invoicing Sales, Projects, and Timesheets were connected within Odoo and tailored to NextLink's specific invoicing requirements — enabling accurate, timely invoices based on tracked time, even across multiple entities and countries.
- Multi-Company Reporting & Access Rights A custom reporting solution was built to consolidate financial data from all subsidiaries under one parent company — later replaced by Odoo 14 Enterprise's native multi-company functionality. In addition, granular access rights were configured to reflect NextLink's internal permission requirements, preventing accidental edits and ensuring only authorized users could perform critical actions such as contract creation or invoice modifications.
The result
The impact of the Odoo implementation was immediate and measurable:
- 93% reduction in time spent on contract management
- 1,500–2,500 invoices per year generated accurately and on time — across multiple countries and entities
- Consolidated financial reporting replaced fragmented Excel-based processes
- One unified platform for CRM, HR, Sales, Projects, Timesheets, and Finance across all offices
NextLink Group's transformation shows what becomes possible when the right technology meets the right implementation approach. By replacing a patchwork of spreadsheets and local tools with a unified Odoo platform, NextLink gained not just efficiency, but the operational clarity needed to manage a global business with confidence.
Want to learn more about our BOP partner VentorTech? Visit the partner page!
