Ditch the Xero Workarounds: Why Australian Fabricators Are Moving to Odoo with MetalFab
For many Australian metal fabrication businesses, running operations on Xero, coupled with some home-grown spreadsheets has long been the default setup.
While Xero handles basic accounting, it was never built to manage trade-specific steel fabrication, nested scrap tracking, or job shop scheduling.
This disconnected architecture creates constant friction:
- estimators manually key Excel figures into Xero,
- stock counts drift, and
- shop floor managers have limited
zeroreal-time visibility into actual job costs versus estimates.
Until now the
onlypath forward has been an expensive custom ERP implementation like Epicor.
The Integrated Alternative: Odoo ERP + MetalFab
MetalFab provides a budget-disruptive path out of the Xero trap by converting Odoo Enterprise into a single operational system.
Instead of relying on external plugins or manual data re-keying, fabricators get full end-to-end integration under one roof:
- Native ATO Compliance: Odoo natively covers Australian tax requirements out of the box – including ATO Single Touch Payroll (STP Phase 2), GST tracking, automated BAS reporting, and Peppol e-Invoicing.
- Integrated Trade CPQ: MetalFab replaces standalone quoting spreadsheets with parametric calculators for common fabrication niches like flashings, structural steel, and fasteners, generating accurate quotes and dynamic Bills of Materials (BOMs) quickly & easily
in seconds. - Real-Time Job Costing: Because accounting shares the same database as inventory and the shop floor, labor tracked via touchscreen tablets and raw steel consumed on plasma cutters immediately post to your general ledger.
By replacing Xero with an integrated Odoo implementation using MetalFab, Australian metal fabricators gain enterprise-grade ERP power at a fraction of traditional ERP costs.