Odoo 20 POS in Syria: What's New for Shops, Cafés and Restaurants

Many Syrian shops price some goods in dollars but take pounds, yet until Odoo 20 each point of sale worked in one currency. Odoo 20 supports multiple currencies at checkout in the same point of sale, so one counter can take USD and SYP. The release notes do not say how change is given or which rate the till applies, so check both in a demo.

The new Syrian pound makes this timely: two zeros came off on 1 January 2026, and old notes stopped being legal tender at the end of July 2026, so prices, rates and cash counts now run on the new scale. Useful settings:

• Update the dollar-to-pound rate by hand under Accounting > Configuration > Currencies; Odoo 20 shows the rate date when totals are converted.
• Set POS cash rounding to the smallest note you accept, and enable Apply only on cash methods so card payments stay unrounded.
• For invoices paid in dollars, Odoo 20 shows the rate as you register the payment and books exchange differences as one line per invoice.
• Across Odoo, staff can type a dot or a comma as the decimal separator, whatever their language setting.

Other counter changes:

• Search the Orders screen by receipt or invoice number.
• Give new cashiers the highly restrictive Supervised access level.
• Rearrange products on screen by drag and drop.
• Connect any label printer via USB proxy and show the base unit price on labels.
• Print a simplified receipt with subtotals and taxes but no order lines.

Most of Odoo 20's restaurant changes target the rush itself. Self-ordering gains an order-specific QR code: guests order from their phones and pay after the meal. Notes customers leave at checkout now reach the kitchen display, and optional products appear on mobile and kiosk menus.

On the floor and at the pass:

• Snooze a dish that runs out, hiding it from the POS and self-order menu until you bring it back.
• For big family tables, the POS suggests turning separate lines into combos.
• Split per product prints one preparation ticket per item, handy when the grill and juice counter work separately.
• Link several printers to one POS and pick which to use, useful with several cash drawers.
• Bookings get their own Kanban and pivot views.

Service fees now come through presets, reusable setups such as dine-in, takeaway and delivery, each of which can carry its own pricelist, opening hours and capacity. The fee is shown on invoices too. Pricelist rules can now be limited to set periods or days of the week, for a weekend offer at a café, for example; as this is a Sales change, confirm in a demo that it applies on your till.

Self-order receipts can now be sent by WhatsApp or SMS. WhatsApp needs Odoo Enterprise, a WhatsApp Business Platform account and pre-approved templates; SMS runs on prepaid credits. Odoo's SMS price list shows Syria as a supported destination; WhatsApp availability depends on Meta, so test it before telling guests, and keep the printed receipt as your default.

Before Odoo 20, tracking stock from the till meant installing the full Inventory app, with its warehouses, locations and transfers. For a grocery in Damascus or a café in Latakia, that was often more than the business needed, so stock stayed in a notebook.

Odoo 20 drops that requirement. Point of Sale and eCommerce can now run simplified stock management without the Inventory app: each product has one on-hand quantity and no transfers are required. Stock on hand and its accounting value can also be managed without Inventory, and sales orders can be fulfilled, shipping confirmation emails included, without it. In practice, a small shop sees what is left on the shelf and what it is worth in the books from its first week.

This suits a step-by-step move to digital: start with the till, simple stock and Accounting, let cashiers get comfortable, and add more when the business asks for it.

Move to the full Inventory app when you have:

• More than one branch or a storeroom, with goods moving between them.
• Products that need lots or expiry dates, such as dairy, medicines or packaged food.
• Purchasing driven by reordering rules.
• Receiving and stock counts you want to run with barcode scanners.

One thing to plan for: Odoo 20 warns cashiers when they select an expired product, but expiry dates can only be set on products tracked by lots or serial numbers, which are switched on in the Inventory app. If expiry matters on your shelves, the warning effectively needs Inventory.

Closing a session is simpler in Odoo 20. Odoo now records one global sale at the close instead of a set of miscellaneous entries, and payment journal entries can be created automatically at a time set in the settings, without closing the session. That helps a restaurant serving past midnight or a shop that keeps one session open through a long day. Familiar controls still apply, such as the maximum cash difference above which a manager must step in, and Odoo's advice to close the register daily. In Accounting, cash journals can now be secured with entry hashing on reconciliation, a tamper-evident seal on those entries.

Offline selling at the till is not new: an open session keeps taking orders and cash through an outage, provided nobody reloads, closes or clears the browser before pending orders sync. Invoices, new customer records and connected card terminals all wait until the line is back.

What Odoo 20 adds is an offline mode for the rest of the system. Back-office staff can create, edit, archive, unarchive and delete records without internet, and re-run searches they ran earlier, so the office keeps working when the connection drops mid-afternoon. As the mode is new, try it on the screens your team uses most before counting on it.

Odoo 20 was released in September 2026, with standard support planned until September 2029. If your tills still run on Odoo 17, its standard support ended in September 2026; paid extended support is available only on Odoo.sh, for a limited number of versions, or on-premise. Odoo 18 is planned to follow in September 2027. Each major version gets three years of standard support, so the upgrade is worth planning rather than rushing.

A sequence that keeps the shop open:

• Request an upgraded test copy of your database and run real work on it: a cash sale, a refund, a payment in each currency and a session close.
• Book the production upgrade outside trading hours, because the database is unavailable while it runs.
• Before it starts, close every POS session and make sure all offline orders have synced.
• Train cashiers on the new access levels and the simplified receipt.
• Budget for pay-per-use items: SMS and AI credits, plus WhatsApp messaging if you use it.

In Syria, add one step: because the currency code stayed SYP after two zeros came off, Odoo sees old and new pounds as the same currency. Enter rates on the new scale, and agree with your accountant how pre-2026 SYP balances are restated.

METCH is a certified Odoo partner with a team in Damascus. If you would like help testing your tills on Odoo 20, book a free consultation or estimate the cost, with pricing in USD.