If you’re a manufacturing business running multiple legal entities (companies) within Odoo, you’ve likely encountered these pain points:
- Can I Share Only Some Products Across Companies in Odoo?
- We want to restrict product access by company in Odoo.
- How to prevent duplicate products in Odoo?
- How to assign product to multiple companies in Odoo?
This is a typical situation in:
- Manufacturing groups with regional or functional divisions
- Companies running intercompany transfers
- Businesses that want to keep product catalogs clean, but access tightly controlled
You’re not alone. This is a common problem faced by manufacturers and multi-entity businesses using Odoo.
The limitation while managing Multi-Company Product Configuration in Odoo.
In Odoo’s standard multi-company setup, here’s how product visibility works:
- Product linked to a single company → Only that company can see it
- Product with no company assigned → All companies can see it
But what if your business requires cross-company product sharing?
Let’s say:
- You want Product A to be shared between Company A and B, but not Company C
- You want Product B to be visible only to Company A and C, but not Company B
- And you want to avoid creating duplicate products for each company
This isn’t possible with the standard Odoo workflow.
To solve this, manufacturers try various workarounds:
Some try to:
- Duplicate the product for each company
- Use naming conventions to distinguish products
- Manually control visibility with record rules
But these cause more problems:
- Confusion in stock transfers
- Data duplication
- More room for human error
- Inefficient reporting & inventory tracking
The Solution: How to Assign Products to Multiple Companies in Odoo?
If Odoo allowed assigning multiple companies to a single product- much like a multi-select, you could:
- Share a product with just Company A and B
- Share another with just A and C
- Keep some global
- Restrict others to a single company
…all without duplicating product records.
This kind of setup is a game changer for manufacturers managing Multi-Company in Odoo.
Here’s how to manage Multi-Company Product Configuration in Odoo:
For a real-world manufacturing company, we enabled multi-company product configuration, making it possible to selectively share products across just the right entities, while keeping everything else as per standard Odoo UX.
- When creating or editing a product, you can simply select multiple companies that should have access to it
- Other companies won’t even see it in their list
- If someone tries to access the product without permission, they get a “No Access” error
- If no company is selected, the product follows Odoo’s default behavior, visible to all
Simple, clean, and business-friendly.
If you’ve found yourself asking the same questions as those on the Odoo forums, it can be solved with the right setup.
We specialize in these practical, high-impact adjustments that make Odoo fit your operational model, especially for complex, multi-entity manufacturers.
