Automated Utility Rebilling System Development

Project Description

Automated Utility Bill Allocation & Tenant Rebilling System (Odoo Online Integration)

1. Project Purpose

The goal of this project is to build a system that automatically processes municipal utility bills and allocates costs per apartment/unit, then re-bills tenants accordingly using Odoo Online.

The system is intended for large residential or mixed-use property portfolios where utility billing is currently handled manually due to the lack of suitable off-the-shelf software.

2. Critical Context (Important for Quoting)

**Municipal bills are provided as unstructured PDFs.**

The PDFs are not machine-generated invoices

They are not CSV/Excel

They do not contain consistent tables

Line items, totals, credits, and references are spread across multiple lines

Meter references and monetary values are not always on the same line

Any solution must therefore include custom PDF text parsing logic, not simple data import.

3. High-Level End-to-End Workflow

From start to finish, the system must:

Accept a municipal utility bill (PDF upload)

Parse unstructured PDF text

Identify utility charges

Group charges by meter reference

Map meters to units/apartments

Allocate costs to the correct Odoo analytic accounts

Create a vendor bill in Odoo

Automatically re-bill tenants via customer invoices in Odoo

4. Core Concepts
4.1 Units / Apartments

Each apartment/unit is represented as an analytic account in Odoo

Example:

Complex: Villa Estates

Unit: 121

Analytic Code: VIL-121

4.2 Utility Meters

Each unit has one or more municipal meters (e.g. water meters)

Meter numbers appear inconsistently throughout the PDF

Each meter must be mapped to a unit

4.3 Tenants

Each unit may have a tenant

Tenants are standard Odoo contacts

Tenant → Unit mapping determines who gets invoiced

5. Functional Requirements
5.1 Admin Interface

A web-based admin interface is required to manage:

Units

Meter → unit mappings

Tenant → unit mappings

Billing products (water, electricity, etc.)

This interface is designed for non-technical administrative users.

5.2 PDF Bill Upload

User uploads an unstructured municipal PDF

The system stores the file

The system extracts raw text from the PDF

5.3 Unstructured PDF Parsing

The system must:

Identify meter reference blocks (e.g. Reference - W123546)

Collect multiple line items associated with a meter

Correctly handle:

Credits (negative amounts)

Adjustments

Partial totals

Aggregate a final total per meter

Ignore unrelated sections of the document

This logic must be custom-built, not generic OCR or table extraction.

5.4 Meter → Unit Matching

Extracted meter references are matched against stored mappings

Unmatched meters must be:

Reported to the user

Correctable via the admin UI

Matched meters proceed to billing

5.5 Vendor Bill Creation (Odoo)

The system creates one vendor bill in Odoo per municipal invoice

Bill characteristics:

One line per meter

Correct monetary amount

Analytic distribution assigning 100% of each line to the relevant unit

Bill can be:

Draft, or

Automatically posted (configurable)

5.6 Tenant Rebilling

Water charges are aggregated per unit

For each unit with a tenant:

A customer invoice is created in Odoo

One invoice line per billing period

Units without tenants are skipped and reported

Invoices can be:

Draft, or

Automatically posted (configurable)

6. Odoo Constraints (Non-Negotiable)

The solution must work with Odoo Online only.

This means:

- XML-RPC / API integration only

- No custom Odoo modules

- No Odoo.sh

- No server-side Odoo code

All business logic must live outside Odoo.

7. Technical Expectations (Implementation-Agnostic)

A complete solution is expected to include:

Backend service (e.g. Python-based)

Database for persistent mappings:

Units

Meters

Tenants

Admin web UI

Robust PDF parsing logic

Odoo API integration

Exact frameworks and tools are flexible.

8. Extensibility Requirements

Although the initial scope is water only, the design must support:

Electricity billing

Rates and refuse

Multiple complexes

Different municipal bill layouts

Historical reconciliation and audit trails

9. Deliverables

A full implementation would typically deliver:

End-to-end working system

Admin UI

PDF parsing engine

Odoo integration

Deployment instructions

Basic documentation Show More