A guide for Australian businesses on SAP ECC, Business One or an S/4HANA quote, from people who have run and supported SAP for more than 30 years.
Most Odoo cost guides are written by web and app agencies, many of them offshore. They tell you an implementation costs “$5,000 to $500,000”, or that it takes “6 to 8 weeks”, and stop there. If you’re on SAP, neither figure helps. Your real question isn’t “what does Odoo cost?” It’s “what does it cost to get off SAP, how long will it take, and what do I stop paying when I do?”
This guide answers those three questions. We’ve spent three decades inside SAP (FI/CO, SD, MM, warranty, integrations) and now move businesses from SAP to Odoo as well as supporting SAP customers. Here’s how the numbers really work.
Why this is the year to work it out
SAP ECC 6.0 mainstream maintenance (Enhancement Packages 6–8) ends on 31 December 2027. Older enhancement packages already lost mainstream maintenance at the end of 2025. After 2027 you have four choices:
- Pay for extended maintenance until the end of 2030, at a surcharge of about two percentage points on your maintenance base. That’s roughly 9% more than you pay now.
- Move to S/4HANA or RISE with SAP. This is a new implementation on a new data model, usually on a cloud subscription.
- Drop to customer-specific maintenance, which gives you much narrower support.
- Move to a different ERP.
Extended maintenance buys time but doesn’t make the decision for you. S/4HANA and Odoo both mean re-implementing, so the fair comparison is S/4HANA against Odoo, not “stay where we are” against Odoo. We cover the dates and every option in detail in SAP ECC end of support 2027.
What you stop paying when you leave SAP
Most guides leave out this half of the equation.
| Cost line | On SAP | On Odoo |
|---|---|---|
| Annual maintenance / subscription | Enterprise Support is typically about 22% of net licence value every year, and more under extended maintenance. RISE is a negotiated subscription priced per FUE; SAP doesn’t publish prices | Published per-user price. Odoo Enterprise Custom (all apps, Studio, multi-company, API) is AUD $80/user/month, list price at the time of writing (October 2026, annual billing) |
| Developer licences | On RISE, Developer Access counts as 2 FUE per developer, twice your most expensive business user. On classic licensing, the developer user is a premium type | None. Developers and Studio users are ordinary users |
| Change requests | A typical change needs a functional consultant, an ABAP developer and, on S/4, a Fiori/UI5 developer, at roughly $900–$1,200/day each in Australia (Hudson, Feb 2026) | Most changes are configuration or Studio work, often done by your own power users |
| Specialist staff | ABAP, Basis, Fiori and BTP skills, on contract or permanent at around $130k–$170k (Hudson) | Python/Odoo skills come from a larger, cheaper pool, and much of the work needs no code |
| Upgrades | Major upgrades are projects in their own right; ECC to S/4 is effectively a re-implementation | Annual version upgrades, which stay cheap if you keep customisation lean |
A worked example: one ordinary change
Add a field to the sales order, make it required, and put a manager approval on Confirm.
- SAP S/4HANA with Fiori: three specialists, about 5–6 days between them, roughly $5,300–$6,400 in services, plus two developer licences at 2 FUE each.
- Odoo: one person in Studio, in under an hour. No developer licence.
Many businesses make twenty changes like this a year. That’s over $100,000 in services on SAP, against a few thousand on Odoo. (This is an illustration built from published day rates, not a client figure. Your own mix of changes will differ.)
What it costs to move: the five cost buckets
Moving from SAP to Odoo is not a small-business “set up Odoo” job. Budget for five things.
Discovery and fit-gap (5–10% of the project)
We map your SAP processes against standard Odoo: order-to-cash, procure-to-pay and record-to-report, plus warranty, service and manufacturing where relevant. We sort everything into four groups: what Odoo does out of the box, what needs configuration, what genuinely needs development, and what you can simply stop doing. On SAP sites that last group is often bigger than people expect, because years of Z-programs were written around old constraints.
Configuration and build
Most of the effort goes here. The first rule is to stay close to standard Odoo, because every custom module has to be carried through every upgrade. We only build where there’s a business reason that survives questioning.
Data migration (often 15–25% on SAP projects)
This is where generalist partners come unstuck. SAP data is deep: company codes, controlling areas, material masters with plant and storage views, condition records, open items, serial and batch history. Deciding what to bring, what to summarise and what to archive takes SAP knowledge, not Odoo knowledge. Most projects bring:
- master data (customers, vendors, materials/products, BOMs, price lists)
- open items (AR, AP, open orders, stock on hand)
- opening balances and summarised history, with the full SAP history archived and still reportable
More on this in SAP data migration to Odoo.
Integrations
EDI, banks, freight, ecommerce, payroll and, in automotive, OEM and dealer systems. Some are replaced by standard Odoo connectors; the rest are rebuilt against Odoo’s API (Custom plan).
Testing, training and cut-over
Parallel runs, user acceptance testing, training by role, and a planned cut-over at period end. SAP and Odoo can run side by side during the transition, so nobody has to bet the business on one weekend. See running SAP and Odoo side by side.
Indicative ranges
These are indicative EnCollab ranges for services only, excluding Odoo licences. Scope drives the number more than headcount does.
| Starting point | Typical scope | Indicative services (AUD) | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAP Business One, single entity, 10–40 users | Finance, sales, purchasing, inventory | $40k – $120k | 3–5 months |
| SAP ECC mid-market, 1–3 entities, 30–150 users | Above, plus manufacturing or warranty/service and integrations | $120k – $200k | 5–9 months |
| SAP ECC complex, multi-entity, heavy integration, regulated | Phased by entity or process | $200k+ | 9–15 months, phased |
For comparison: industry estimates put mid-market S/4HANA migration consulting and implementation services at around US$1M–8M (Tachyon, 2026). Those figures are vendor-published, so treat them with care. Independent ERP surveys also regularly report that a large share of projects, on every platform, run over budget.
On top of services, add the licence: 50 users on Odoo Custom is about AUD $48k a year at the list price at the time of writing. That’s a published price you can check on Odoo’s pricing page, not a negotiation, though Odoo often runs promotional discounts.
How the time breaks down
“Five to nine months” means little until you can see where the weeks go. Here’s a typical mid-market SAP ECC move. Some phases run side by side, so the total is shorter than the sum.
| Phase | What happens | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery and fit-gap | Read your SAP configuration and custom code, map processes to standard Odoo, agree phase-one scope | 3–6 weeks |
| Solution design | Entities, chart of accounts, roles, approvals, integration design, data mapping rules | 2–3 weeks |
| Configuration and build | Set up Odoo, build only the agreed extensions, demo back in short cycles | 6–12 weeks |
| Data migration (runs alongside the build) | Extract from SAP, cleanse, map, and do at least three trial loads before the real one | 6–10 weeks |
| Integrations (runs alongside the build) | Rebuild or replace each interface and test it end to end | 4–8 weeks |
| Testing | System testing, then user acceptance testing on real scenarios and migrated data | 3–5 weeks |
| Training | Role-based training for key users first, then everyone else | 1–2 weeks |
| Cut-over | Final data load and go-live at a period end, with SAP kept read-only for reference | 1 week |
| Hypercare | Close support after go-live through the first month-end close | 4–6 weeks |
From SAP Business One the same phases compress: discovery and data migration are lighter, so 3–5 months is typical. Complex ECC estates move in phases by entity or process, and each phase runs this cycle again in a shorter form.
Two phases are longer than on a fresh Odoo implementation, and that’s deliberate. Discovery takes longer because we read what your SAP system actually does, not just what people say it does. Data migration takes longer because SAP data has far more structure to untangle. Skipping time on either is the most common way an SAP exit slips later.
What slows an SAP exit, and what speeds it up
Most delays on an ERP project come from the business, not the software. On an SAP exit they have particular causes.
What slows it down
- Key users who still have a day job. The finance and supply-chain people who know SAP best are also the ones closing the month. If the project only gets them after month-end, elapsed time can double.
- Z-code nobody can explain. Custom programs written fifteen years ago, by people long gone, have to be understood before anyone can decide whether to replace them or retire them.
- SAP data depth. Duplicate materials, dormant customers, old condition records and inconsistent units of measure all have to be dealt with before the first trial load.
- Slow decisions. Every open design question waiting on sign-off costs about a week. SAP-era approval chains are often longer than a move like this needs.
- Moving everything at once. Trying to replace every module, every report and every interface in phase one is the surest way to miss a date.
- Running both systems too long. A short parallel run builds confidence. A long one doubles the workload for the people you most need.
What speeds it up
- A named project owner with real time set aside for the project and the authority to decide
- A clear phase-one scope, with the rest deliberately left to phase two
- Master data cleansing that starts in SAP during discovery, not after the build
- Cut-over planned around a quiet period end, not the end of the financial year
- A partner who can read your SAP configuration directly, so discovery is spent on decisions, not on reverse-engineering
The things that blow the budget, and how to avoid them
- Rebuilding SAP in Odoo. Recreating every Z-report and custom screen is the fastest way to double the cost. Start from standard Odoo and justify each exception.
- Migrating 15 years of history. Archive it and keep it reportable; don’t load it all.
- Choosing a partner who doesn’t know SAP. A partner who can’t read your SAP configuration can’t scope your migration, and the surprises arrive in month four. See choosing an Odoo partner in Australia.
- Under-funding data cleansing. Duplicate customers and dead materials in SAP become duplicates in Odoo.
- Leaving the decision until 2027. Rushed projects cost more, and extended maintenance becomes a cost you pay on top of the migration.
When we’d tell you to stay on SAP
If it’s true, we’ll say so in the assessment. Odoo may not be the right move if:
- you’re a large enterprise tied into a global SAP template your parent company mandates
- your industry relies on SAP-specific solutions with no practical Odoo equivalent
- you’ve recently invested heavily in S/4HANA and it’s working
For everyone else, especially mid-market businesses on ECC or Business One facing a forced re-implementation, put Odoo side by side with S/4HANA before you sign. Our honest comparison of Odoo and SAP S/4HANA is a good place to start.
Who’s done it
- A New Zealand automotive distributor was heading to SAP. After a side-by-side assessment they chose Odoo, with EnCollab’s vehicle and warranty capability covering the automotive-specific processes.
- An Australian corporate group is moving its businesses off SAP to Odoo, one entity at a time.
Work out your number: a free SAP Exit Assessment
In a short engagement we’ll:
- review your current SAP landscape: version, modules, custom code, integrations, users
- map what moves to standard Odoo, what needs building, and what you can retire
- estimate the services cost, a phase-by-phase timeline, and Odoo licences
- compare it with your current SAP run cost and an S/4HANA path
You get a written summary you can take to your board, whether or not you go ahead with us.
Book a free SAP Exit Assessment
FAQ
How much does it cost to move from SAP to Odoo?
For a mid-market SAP ECC business, services typically cost between $120k and $200k, depending on entities, integrations and data. Moves from SAP Business One usually cost $40k–$120k, and complex multi-entity programs more than $200k. Odoo licences are a published per-user price on top.
How long does an SAP to Odoo migration take?
About 3–5 months from Business One and 5–9 months for a mid-market ECC site, including 4–6 weeks of support after go-live. Complex estates move in phases. The phase table above shows where the time goes.
What’s the most common reason an SAP exit runs late?
Key users who don’t have time for the project, followed by data that takes longer to clean than planned. Both can be managed if you plan for them from the start.
Can we keep our SAP history?
Yes. We bring open items, balances and summarised history into Odoo, and archive the full SAP history so it stays reportable.
Is Odoo enterprise-grade enough to replace SAP?
For most mid-market businesses, yes. Finance, supply chain, manufacturing, service and HR are all standard, and Odoo can be extended in Python without developer licences. The section on when to stay on SAP covers the cases where SAP remains the better fit.
Does Odoo support Australian GST and BAS?
Yes. Odoo’s Australian localisation covers GST and the BAS report, and is configured during implementation. Odoo also has an Australian payroll module; confirm its current Single Touch Payroll scope against your needs during discovery, or keep your existing payroll system and integrate it.
What happens to our SAP-specific processes, like warranty claims?
Standard Odoo covers most of them. For automotive vehicle and warranty processes, EnCollab’s Fleetlane and warranty capability work alongside Odoo.
Can we run SAP and Odoo in parallel during the move?
Yes, for a short, planned period. Phased moves by entity or process are common and reduce risk.
Sources
- SAP Community: Maintenance timelines for SAP ERP 6.0 (ECC)
- Rimini Street: No extension to ECC 6 mainstream maintenance end dates
- Hudson SAP Salary Guide Australia 2026
- SAP: RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Service Use Descriptions
- Odoo pricing
- Odoo documentation: Australia fiscal localisation
- Tachyon: S/4HANA migration costs for mid-market enterprises