Printing a hundred Odoo invoices in one go

If a business issues a hundred invoices a day and most of them are three or four lines, spending a sheet of A4 on each one is not only a paper cost. Printer consumables, archive thickness and printing time all rise at the same rate.

Odoo prints invoices one at a time, one per page. Printing a hundred means either a hundred clicks or selecting and printing them one by one.

These are two separate problems

1. You cannot select in bulk. Not being able to print a hundred invoices in one action eats the day of whoever sits at the till or in accounting. In businesses that print at end of day, this sometimes takes an hour.
2. The page is wasted. A three-line invoice fills a quarter of an A4 and the rest goes blank. Across thousands of invoices a month this becomes a real line item.

They are separate problems with separate fixes, but in practice they arrive together.

The fix: A5, two to a page

The module we wrote splits the A4 down the middle and prints one invoice on each half. A cut line stays between them, so staff separate the sheet and hand out both invoices.

• Several invoices are selected and printed in one action; pages are arranged two-up automatically.
• Odoo’s own invoice template is used, so logo, address and tax details come through unchanged. There is no second template to maintain.
• Paper and printer consumption halves, and so does the thickness of the archive.

When it helps and when it does not

This module exists for a particular kind of business. If your invoices are long, meaning each one already fills a page, it does nothing for you: split in half, the text will not fit.

Where it does help:

• Retail and grocery, where invoices are short and numerous.
• Service and repair work, where every job order becomes its own invoice and most run to a few lines.
• Subscription and periodic billing, issued in one batch at the start of the month.

What to watch on the printer side

Once two invoices share a sheet, printer settings start to matter. The three things we run into most during setup:

1. Margins. Most printers cannot print within a few millimetres of the paper edge. The cut line sits in the middle so this rarely bites, but if your template uses very narrow margins, run a test page first.
2. Scaling. If the driver arrives with "fit to page" enabled, the output shrinks and the two invoices stop being centred. That option must be off and the scale left at one hundred per cent.
3. Duplex. With double-sided printing on, the back of each sheet gets used too and things get confusing at the cutting stage. For bulk printing it needs to be off.

Once those three are set they are never touched again, but the first run made without setting them usually goes in the bin.

What it saves besides paper

Paper cost looks like a small line item at first glance, and it is. The real gain is elsewhere:

• Printing time. Fifty sheets instead of a hundred, so the printer finishes in half the time. At end-of-day closing that is a concrete difference.
• Archive space. Where physical archives are kept, the number of folders halves. Under statutory retention periods this becomes a storage question.
• Toner. Fewer pages means less toner, because consumption is driven by page transit rather than by inked area.