Handmade since 1797, now with a foundation in Odoo for store, online shop and order process
Since 1797, Prantl has stood for fine stationery in Munich. Ruetech is introducing Odoo 19 Enterprise in phases; this report shows where things stand in September 2026.
Handwork belongs in the product, not in the back office
A heritage house with a store, an online shop and a small team has no spare capacity for admin, and the obligations keep growing.
The house offers fine paper goods and printed stationery with artful finishing, for weddings, births, mourning and business clients. It sells in its own store, in its online shop and to loyal customers who order by phone or email.
From outside come a new website with a 3D configurator and newsletter consents that must be kept clean. From inside, a small team needs every hour for the product and the customer, not for reconciling spreadsheets.
The missing piece was not an interface, but a system the team can set up itself
Store and shop sales did reach the old system. The team could hardly use them, because nobody in-house could set the system up. On top of that, the interface was unreliable in daily use.
So the risk for a heritage house is not a missing interface. It is a system nobody in-house can set up. Every rule the team cannot set itself turns into manual work:
- Payments: Transfers without an order number are matched by hand. Lump-sum payouts from the payment provider cannot be matched to individual orders at all.
- Accounting: Postings are exported every month, quarterly files are built for the tax advisor, bank statements are uploaded by hand.
- Catalog: The product master was outdated. For the new website, the team rebuilt the category tree outside the system.
- Regular customers: Orders by phone or email are re-typed. Whether anyone follows up depends on memory.
- Newsletter: It went out semi-manually to a large list, and the new website brings more sign-ups. Anyone who unsubscribes must never get mail again. The system has to guarantee that, not someone's memory.
- Configurator: It creates custom products with variable pricing. Nothing linked the finished configuration to order, invoice and print job. Every manual transfer is a chance to print the wrong version.
Thursday afternoon. In the store, a customer collects her wedding invitations; on the phone, a regular asks for a quote. In the office, a bank transfer without an order number sits next to a lump-sum payout from the payment provider, and the quarterly files for the tax advisor are not done yet. An order from the new configurator waits for someone to re-type it into an invoice and a print job.
What a house like Prantl needs, before any product name comes up
One catalog for register and shop, one customer file, a written order process, and rules the team changes without a developer.
- One catalog: Categories and photos serve the store register and the online shop at once. When a product is withdrawn from the shop, it disappears from the register too.
- Checked orders: Shop orders arrive on their own, but as drafts. A person checks them before they are confirmed. The live shop stays protected from changes made in the ERP.
- A process in the house's own words: The house writes down how an order should run, and the system carries it out: order, confirmation, print job, shipping with tracking number, follow-up.
- Rules instead of spreadsheets: Payments are matched by rules. The documents for the tax advisor come out of the system.
- Training inside the system: Know-how lives in the system, not in one colleague's head.
What counts for management: a clearly bounded scope, no risk to the live shop, and as much standard as possible. Standard is what the team can run and change itself. Hence Odoo, in phases. In April 2026, Prantl and Ruetech reviewed the requirements together on real data: customer file, sales, categories and the plans for the website. Ruetech proposed testing the data migration first with a small sample of customer records.
What is in place today: shop connection, store register and Prantl's own domain
Orders, customers and the catalog flow from the shop into Odoo by themselves, with no duplicates. The live shop stays untouched.
- Check first, then confirm: The connection only reads. New orders arrive as drafts, so someone checks them before confirmation. Running the sync again creates no duplicate customers, products or orders.
- A register with the real catalog: The same categories, the website photos, cash and card payment. Products withdrawn from the shop drop off the register automatically. Opening and closing the register stays a job for the store team.
- Set up for Germany: Localization, euro and the VAT rates taken over from the shop, so totals match to the cent.
- Its own address: The production and test systems run on Prantl's own domain.
The order process comes from the client: 13 of 18 requirements in standard Odoo
Prantl wrote down the order process it wants to run. Standard Odoo covers 13 of its 18 requirements, with no custom code needed.
Prantl's project lead described how an order should run: order, order confirmation plus a print order to the print partner with the end customer's address, shipping with tracking number, follow-up with the customer. The house's own process turns out to be less special than it feels. Custom code comes in only where standard falls short.
Ruetech summarized the whole flow on one page: four phases, six emails. Management sees at a glance what the customer receives and when.
In a clearly labeled demo, the flow runs end to end, with German email texts. It is not yet running on real orders. Open points, such as the print-file handover from the configurator, are being resolved together with Prantl.
The team learns inside the system, and the store go-live is ahead
Guides inside Odoo and 11 short video lessons in 5 chapters: new team members learn the register, stock and invoices unassisted.
The chapters cover the store register, stock, products, users and invoices. The lessons stay available for every future hire. Live training for the store team follows.
Project status, September 2026: the shop connection and the store register are set up on Prantl's own domain. Go-live in the store and live use of the order process are still ahead.
Next on the list:
- Migration of legacy data and CRM configuration
- Bank matching, including the payment provider's lump-sum payouts, and documents for the tax advisor straight from the system
- The period-comparison dashboard management asked for: last week, last three months and year to date, each against last year
- Live training in the store and a real test of the print-file handover from the configurator
Do you run a store and an online shop with a small team? Write your order process on one page, from order to follow-up, exactly as it runs today. We put it next to standard Odoo and tell you which steps run without custom code and where manual work hides in your house today.
