Duplicate products in Odoo (1): how to merge two products that are only sold

The same product can end up twice in Odoo: one was created by hand and the other arrived with an import from a spreadsheet or from the previous system. While both are in use, orders and invoices are split between them and sales reports show the same product on two lines.

This article opens a series on duplicate products in Odoo. We start with the simplest case: two products without variants that are only sold. The cases with variants, purchases and inventory are outlined at the end and will be covered in the next articles.

The case

An IT maintenance company sells a monthly service. It created it by hand as "Monthly maintenance" with the reference SRV-MANT. Months later it imported its customers and prices from a spreadsheet, and the import created another "Monthly maintenance" with the reference MANT-01.

Both are services: they are not purchased or kept in stock. There are already orders and invoices with each one, and the sales report shows the service twice.

It is the same situation a user describes in a Reddit discussion about Odoo 17: several almost identical services that they want to combine into one without editing the existing sales orders by hand.

What to check before merging

• That they really are the same product: the same price, unit of measure, taxes and sales description.
• Which record to keep: the one with the correct name and reference. Its values stay; the duplicate's values only fill the fields that are empty in the kept record.
• What depends on the duplicate's template: pricelist rules, images or website texts. These do not move to the kept product.

How to do it with Xopgi Consolidate

1. In Sales → Configuration → Settings, enable "Product Variants". Without it, the Sales → Products → Product Variants menu does not appear, and that is where you merge from. Even if your products have no variants, every Odoo product is a template with one variant, and orders and invoices point to the variant.
2. In Settings → Object Consolidation, enable consolidation for "Product Variant".
3. In Sales → Products → Product Variants, select both products and choose Actions → Consolidate.
4. In "To keep", choose SRV-MANT and click Consolidate.

What happens when you merge

• Sales order lines and invoice lines, including posted invoices, move to SRV-MANT. The description of each line does not change: it keeps the text it was sold with.
• The sales report shows the service once, with the quantities of both products.
• MANT-01 is archived, and the chatter of SRV-MANT keeps a copy of its data.
• Pricelist rules on the MANT-01 template stay on that template. If you need them, create them for SRV-MANT before merging.
• Check Sales → Products afterwards: if MANT-01 is still listed, archive it too.

Why this is the simplest case

There are no purchases, vendors or stock. There are only sales orders and invoices, and they all point to the product variant. As soon as the product has variants, is purchased or is kept in a warehouse, other records depend on it and there is more to check before merging.

The next cases in the series

• Products with variants: an imported product "Blue T-shirt M" next to the size M variant of "Blue T-shirt".
• Variants that are only purchased: besides purchase orders, vendor pricelists, which are linked to the template.
• Products that are purchased and sold: an industrial filter created by hand with purchases and an imported one with sales.
• Products with inventory: stock quantities, moves, cost and valuation. It is the most complex case and we will outline it separately.
• Other cases to study: manufactured products with bills of materials, components of a production chain, kits, and products sold in the online shop or the point of sale.

Conclusion

With two products that are only sold, merging is quick: you choose the record to keep, run the consolidation from the variants list, and orders, invoices and reports end up on a single product. What needs preparing beforehand are the pricelist rules and the data that depend on the duplicate's template.

Xopgi Consolidate for Odoo 19: https://apps.odoo.com/apps/modules/19.0/xopgi_consolidate

Reddit discussion about consolidating products in Odoo 17: https://www.reddit.com/r/Odoo/comments/1gky7bv/