Odoo Developer — Fix Multi-Company HR/Payroll Defects, Long-Term Potential

We are an international non-profit running Odoo Enterprise v17 across several country programmes in East Africa in a multi-company setup. Our core usage is Employees, Time Off, Work Schedules and Payroll, plus a few custom modules. We are preparing for v19. We have live defects affecting payroll accuracy and reporting, and we need them fixed properly. That is what we are hiring for and it starts immediately. Almost every change to our system has gone through external vendors until now, and we want to build internal ownership instead. Separately, over the medium term, we are exploring whether Odoo Community would suit us better long term. Examples of what you would work on first - Add a sub-office attribute to the employee record and surface it in payroll summary reporting, with subtotals per sub-office. - Ensure validation reliably prevents duplicate employee bank account records, including across companies in the same database. - Fix half-day and reduced-hours schedule handling so that leave is deducted proportionally rather than against a default full day. - Diagnose recurring work-entry defects. Each pay run a few employees get work entries against the wrong schedule, understating hours and basic pay. We correct these by hand today and want a root cause, not another workaround. Harden and document outbound email (leave approvals, payslip notices) into a repeatable check we can run each cycle. - Finalise custom domain configuration for the production database and portal. Two things run alongside the fixes rather than after them: written documentation of our payroll, time-off and work-schedule rules per country programme, clear enough that a Finance or HR colleague can answer "how is this salary calculated?" without a developer; and regular pair-programming and code-review sessions with our internal staff. Reproduction steps, logs and the full backlog go to shortlisted candidates. Skills we need - 4+ years hands-on Odoo development: Python, XML, ORM, QWeb reports, OWL where needed. - Production experience with hr, hr_contract, hr_holidays, hr_work_entry and hr_payroll, including salary rules and structures, work entry types, and payroll reporting. - Multi-company Odoo, including record rules and cross-company data integrity. - Confident debugging in a live environment: server logs, SQL, scheduled actions, mail queue. - Git-based workflow and custom module development. Studio-only experience is not enough. - Clear written and spoken English, and comfort talking directly with non-technical HR and Finance colleagues. Helpful but not required: - v19 or version-upgrade experience (OpenUpgrade or equivalent) - OCA module experience - an Enterprise-to-Community migration you have delivered - payroll in African jurisdictions or the INGO sector - self-hosted Odoo (Docker, deployment, backups) How we work - Hourly via Upwork, roughly 8–15 hours per week to start, ongoing. - Working hours within CET ±3. One short weekly call, asynchronous messaging in between. We do not expect instant replies. We do expect blockers to be raised early rather than discovered late. - You work directly with our internal system owner and team. - Changes are delivered as versioned modules in our repository with a short written handover, not as undocumented manual edits. - We would rather you tell us a request is a bad idea than quietly implement it. When you apply, please include your timezone, weekly availability, and hourly rate. Begin your proposal with the words WORK ENTRIES so we know you've read this.