Odoo POS — bank compatibility

Odoo is a point-of-sale system for newsagencies and retail. Open-source ERP out of Belgium with a till inside it — nobody buys this for the POS alone.

Certified on Linkly and on Tyro. Worth knowing the difference: Tyro is its own acquirer, so that route means banking with Tyro. The Linkly route does not.

It handles split bills.

The Linkly integration runs in the cloud or on premise. Linkly holds 5 separate certified builds for it, so what works depends which one you are on.

Odoo was written in 2005 by Fabien Pinckaers in Belgium and shipped as TinyERP, renamed OpenERP in 2008 and Odoo in 2014. It is dual-licensed: a Community edition under GNU LGPLv3 and a paid Enterprise edition with proprietary apps, available on-premises or as SaaS. By 2021 it reported more than 5 million users. Revenue was €282 million in 2023, up 33% year on year, and a US$500 million secondary round in November 2024 valued the company at US$5.26 billion with more than 2,200 staff.

Point of sale is one app among dozens — CRM, accounting, ecommerce, inventory, manufacturing, project management, HR. That is the whole proposition and also the catch. The POS is cheap and capable if you are already running Odoo for the rest of the business, and an odd choice if you are not, because you would be adopting an ERP to get a till.

One practical note that matters more than the feature list: because it is open source, most Australian Odoo work goes through implementation partners rather than Odoo direct. The quality of your install, your integrations and your payment setup depends on which partner you pick. Ask who is doing the implementation, what happens to your customisations when Odoo ships its next version, and who owns the payment integration when something breaks at the counter.