Odoo 20 Accounting in Jordan: JoFotara, 16% Tax and What Changed

For Jordanian finance teams, the headline of Odoo 20 is a smoother and safer link to JoFotara, the national e-invoicing system run by the Income and Sales Tax Department. Around it sits a wider set of accounting changes: faster bill entry, a stricter bank workflow, renamed payment statuses and a new way to structure the chart of accounts. This guide covers only what Odoo 20 changes. The basics of e-invoicing and of the 16% general sales tax are already in our JoFotara guide and our sales tax guide.

Odoo 20 was released in September 2026, and the support calendar is now a planning question rather than a technicality:

• Odoo 20: standard support planned until September 2029
• Odoo 19: until September 2028
• Odoo 18: until September 2027
• Odoo 17: standard support ended in September 2026

If your company is still on Odoo 17, it is already outside standard support. Databases on Odoo Online must also move to a newer major version every two years. The upgrade itself is free with Odoo Enterprise, covering standard apps, Studio customizations and custom modules under a maintenance contract. It does not cover data cleaning, third-party or in-house modules without a maintenance contract, or training, so budget for those separately.

Supplier bills eat much of a finance team's week, and that is where Odoo 20 saves the most typing. With bill line prediction, Odoo fills in the product, account, tax, analytic distribution and even the vehicle on a keyed-in or imported vendor bill, based on the bill history and the line label. For a Jordanian company receiving the same monthly bills from its landlord, courier, fuel supplier and telecom provider, the accountant's job shifts from typing lines to reviewing them once that history builds up.

A few other changes make daily entry safer:

• Duplicate warnings come in two levels: red when a bill is almost certainly a duplicate, yellow when it deserves a look before posting. It is also available in Odoo 19, so it is new only if you are coming from Odoo 18 or earlier.
• Bills and expense receipts can be shared from a phone straight into Odoo for digitizing.
• “Reset to Draft” works on many entries at once from any list view, and an invoice's journal items can be split.

The change Jordanian sellers will notice most is the Tax Included / Tax Excluded switch on sales orders, purchase orders and invoices. A shop in Amman can issue a document where 11.600 JOD already contains the tax (10.000 JOD net plus 1.600 JOD at 16%), while the same company's wholesale team quotes before tax. Individual taxes can be set to override the switch, so review your special-rate and exempt taxes with that in mind.

Odoo 20 tightens the bank side of the books. Every journal entry touching a bank account must now come from a bank transaction, so manual bank entries are no longer allowed. Bank charges, cheque collections and internal transfers that were posted by hand must now come through bank transactions.

Reconciliation gains practical tools:

• A bank reconciliation summary report of reconciled and unreconciled transactions at the period's end date.
• A “Run Auto Reconciliation” option to re-run matching on demand.
• Easier splitting of one bank transaction across several accounts.
• Matching Rules with a payment tolerance and a matching order.
• Manual reconciliation on any account, with “Allow Reconciliation” renamed “Payment Reconciliation”.

Payment statuses are renamed: “In Process” becomes “Paid” and “Paid” becomes “Reconciled”, while “Mark as Reconciled” moves to the action menu. The payment wizard now deducts payments already marked “Paid” from the amount due and sorts outstanding payments by date, so a supplier transfer that has left your account but is not yet reconciled is not paid twice. Importers paying in US dollars or euros also see the conversion rate on foreign-currency payments, and converted totals show the exchange-rate date.

Bills can be paid from Odoo, singly or in batches with one signature, through a new PISP interface. Availability depends on the country and the bank's connection provider, and Odoo's documentation covers it only through Ponto, a European provider that pays via SEPA credit transfers. Do not count on it with Jordanian banks unless yours confirms support.

Sending to JoFotara gets four Jordan-specific changes in Odoo 20:

• Before an invoice goes out, Odoo checks the supplier's country and tax number (TIN), which on a sales invoice are your own company's details.
• JoFotara errors are handled in the Send wizard itself.
• JoFotara fields are grouped under the Other Info tab.
• Several submission scenarios are supported for invoices and Point of Sale receipts.

In practice, a missing tax number or a wrong country on your company record is caught before submission, and whoever sends the invoice fixes it in one place.

Some JoFotara items in the Odoo 20 notes are not new to this version. The Transit, Foreign Trade and Free Zone Transfer invoice types and the refined line matching for credit-note and Point of Sale refund synchronization are available from Odoo 17, and JoFotara-compliant Point of Sale receipts from Odoo 18. If you already use them, they are not a reason to upgrade on their own.

On tax, Odoo's Jordan localization ships with 16% standard sales tax, exempt and 0% export taxes, and Odoo 20 does not change those rates. What changes is the setup around them: the tax-included switch above, and a stricter fiscal-position rule. A tax now stays on an invoice only if it belongs to the invoice's fiscal position; a default tax outside it is removed even when there is no replacement. Exporters and companies with exempt customers should check those fiscal positions carefully.

Before the upgrade, walk through this list with whoever owns your books:

• Update saved filters, reports and staff guides for the renamed payment statuses.
• Find every manual bank journal entry and the routines built on it, and decide how each will come through bank transactions.
• Review your chart of accounts reporting structure, since account groups are replaced by parent accounts, and decide whether you still want account codes now that they are optional.
• Check default taxes on products and accounts against your fiscal positions, especially the 0% export and exempt ones.
• Review asset models, which become depreciation models, with asset setup moving to the asset accounts.
• Tell your accountants that approved expenses now arrive as draft vendor bills in the default expense journal, and that the separate Employee Expenses menu is gone.
• If you plan to use AI features, budget for IAP credits, which all of them now consume.
• Set aside time for data cleaning, uncovered modules and training, which the free upgrade does not include.

At METCH, a certified Odoo partner serving Jordan, we start by listing which of these finance changes touch your database, customizations and integrations. We then upgrade a copy so your accountants can post bills, register payments and reconcile the bank in Odoo 20 before the live switch, and we finish with short training and a scheduled cut-over. A free consultation is the simplest way to see what this means for your books.