More and more Belgian companies offer their employees a cafeteria plan. The principle is simple: your employees convert part of their gross salary into benefits that better fit their personal situation. Think of a bike lease, extra vacation days, hospitalization insurance for the family or a home office setup.
In practice, that administration often runs on complex Excel files or expensive specialized tools. With all the consequences that come with it: errors in formulas, outdated versions, high license costs and an approval process nobody has a view on. That is why we built a full-fledged cafeteria plan module for Odoo.
What can the module do?
Configurable per year
HR sets the rules per calendar year: the available choice budget, maximum amounts per benefit, depreciation rules and calculation formulas. All percentages and amounts are adjustable: NSSO contributions (the social security contributions on wages), vacation pay percentages, VAT rates, depreciation periods and the ratio between gross and net cost.
You also set the help text per benefit type yourself. That way your employees get a clear explanation for every choice, without HR having to keep answering the same questions.
Configurable benefit types
The module comes with 16 common benefit types from the Belgian market. You add types per year, adjust them or disable them. They are automatically grouped into five categories: mobility, social benefits, multimedia, work-life balance and home office. Each benefit type has its own calculation logic, so the module follows your company's salary agreements.
Visual and user-friendly
Your employees see at a glance their total budget, what is left and how much they save compared to a payout in net cash. A visual budget ring shows usage, a clear card selector makes choosing intuitive. Everything works smoothly in both light and dark mode.
Clear approval process
The module follows a fixed status flow, from preparation to closing:
- Preparation: HR configures the plan, the employee does not see it yet
- Employee: the employee chooses and changes benefits
- Submitted: the choice is confirmed and awaits approval by HR
- Confirmed: the plan is final
- Closed: the year has ended
Every status change ends up in the chatter, the message log attached to every document in Odoo. That way you always have a complete trail of who decided what and when.
Smart calculations, fully configurable
The module automatically calculates the actual cost of each choice for the budget, based on configurable formulas. You set all parameters per year: NSSO percentages, vacation pay, VAT rules, depreciation periods and the parameters for the net simulation. For multimedia and office furniture, the module takes depreciation periods into account and automatically carries residual values over to the next year.
Does the legislation change? Then you adjust the parameters and all plans recalculate automatically. No rebuilding formulas, no digging through last year's files.
Secure and correct
Security rules ensure that employees only see their own plan, and only after HR has released it. Validations prevent anyone from exceeding the budget or choosing an impossible combination.
Why not a spreadsheet?
A cafeteria plan in Excel works until you have 10 employees. After that, it becomes a nightmare of version control, manual checks and missed deadlines. Specialized cafeteria plan tools solve that, but at high license costs and with yet another system alongside your ERP. In Odoo, everything is in one platform: the HR data, the approval flow, the communication via the chatter and the calculations. No double entry, no extra logins, always up to date.
By the way, we only build custom development when it really pays off. This module exists because standard Odoo does not cover this process. You can read how we make that trade-off in our approach. Are you torn between standard and custom development for another process? Then also read why the Odoo subscriptions module is not always the right choice.
Interested?
The cafeteria plan module is available for the current Odoo version and the one before it, and fully adaptable to your company's rules. We deliberately build it to be upgradable, so you can move smoothly to every new release. You can read what that involves in our blog post on migrating to a new Odoo version.
Curious what a cafeteria plan in Odoo means for your company?
Schedule a no-obligation thirty-minute introductory call. No sales pitch, just concrete answers to your situation. Or call us at +32 53 89 50 21.
Schedule an introductory call