Park Avenue Coffee began as a single neighbourhood cafe in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew into a multi-business hospitality operation with six cafe locations, its own coffee roasting company and a baking division. As each part of the group expanded, it picked up its own software, and by the early 2020s the business was running three separate systems that did not talk to each other.

After an expensive and incomplete NetSuite project, the leadership team moved the whole group onto Odoo in 2024. The result is a single multi-company ERP that connects cafe purchasing, roasting, baking, inventory and accounting. Odoo reports that creating a sales order now takes 75% less time, fulfilling and invoicing orders is 90% faster than under NetSuite, and the year-end inventory count that used to take a full week is finished by January 2.

About Park Avenue Coffee

Dale Schotte opened the first Park Avenue Coffee shop in 2006 after two decades working in IT consulting. Collaborating with someone who had opened a coffee shop sparked the idea of starting his own. The group added Ann and Allen Baking Company in 2009 and launched its own roasting operation in 2012 so it could control the beans served across its cafes. Today the cafes, roastery and bakery sit under a holding company, with Dale as CEO and founder and his sister Marilyn Scull as COO. The company employs around 50 people, and 10 of them work directly in Odoo.

The Challenge

Each business unit had grown up on its own tools. The roasting company ran QuickBooks Enterprise, the coffee shops used Restaurant365, and the bakery kept its books in QuickBooks Online. None of these systems shared data, so financial reporting for the group was fragmented, inventory tracking was slow, and staff had to re-key the same information in more than one place. For a vertically integrated business, where the cafes buy coffee from the roastery and baked goods from the bakery, that duplication touched almost every transaction.

In 2021 the group tried to solve the problem with NetSuite. The project dragged on, promised features never fully arrived, and costs kept climbing. According to Dale, the company was paying about $48,000 a year for NetSuite and still did not have a working system. Screens were slow to load, and correcting a mistake often meant deleting entire entries and starting again. By early 2024 the leadership team was evaluating SAP, Oracle and Acumatica as replacements before discovering Odoo.

• Three disconnected systems across cafes, roastery and bakery, with no shared data
• Fragmented group financials and manual, duplicated data entry between business units
• Cumbersome inventory tracking and a year-end stock count that took a full week
• A stalled NetSuite implementation costing roughly $48,000 a year without delivering a working system
• Slow screens and rigid error correction that held up day-to-day order processing

The Solution

Park Avenue Coffee chose Odoo in early 2024, partly on the strength of peer reviews the team found in an online business community, and worked with an implementation partner to clean up its data and migrate away from NetSuite. The group now runs a single Odoo database hosted on Odoo.sh, configured as a multi-company environment so each business keeps its own books while sharing products, customers and inventory.

Multi-company accounting

Odoo Accounting gives each entity in the holding company its own ledger while letting finance see the whole group in one place. Inter-company transactions are handled natively, which replaced the separate QuickBooks files and the reconciliation work that came with them.

Inter-company purchasing and sales

Odoo Purchase and Sales are linked across companies, so when a cafe raises a purchase order for baked goods, Odoo automatically creates the matching sales order in the bakery. This removed a layer of duplicate data entry that previously happened every day.

Inventory and manufacturing for roasting and baking

Odoo Inventory and Manufacturing track raw materials, production and finished goods for both the roastery and the bakery. The Quality app supports production checks, giving the team better control over the products that flow into its own cafes.

CRM, website and people

Odoo CRM and Website support customer-facing sales activity, while the Employees app keeps staff records in the same platform as operations and finance, reducing the number of tools the team has to maintain.

Implementation Journey

The move to Odoo followed years of frustration with the previous ERP project, so a clean migration was a priority. Working with its implementation partner, the team cleaned up legacy data and transitioned from NetSuite to Odoo in a project that Dale described as efficient and well supported, a sharp contrast to the earlier rollout. The group implemented nine Odoo apps: CRM, Sales, Website, Purchase, Inventory, Accounting, Quality, Employees and Manufacturing, all on Odoo.sh hosting. Ten users work in the system across the cafes, roastery, bakery and back office. Odoo published the customer story in February 2025.

The Results

The most visible change is speed. Dale reports that Odoo screens respond instantly, where the team used to wait on NetSuite page loads throughout the day. That responsiveness, combined with automated inter-company documents, has shortened the order cycle from quotation to invoice. Year-end, traditionally the most stressful period for finance, has also changed shape: the full inventory count and the related accounting adjustments are now completed by January 2 rather than consuming an entire week. Just as important for a growing group, multi-company corrections are straightforward, so a single error no longer forces the team to delete and rebuild whole entries. Leadership now sees the business as positioned to expand without adding more disconnected software.

• Creating a sales order takes 75% less time than before
• Fulfilling and invoicing orders is 90% faster than under NetSuite
• Year-end inventory and accounting adjustments completed by January 2, down from a full week
• Cafe purchase orders automatically generate bakery sales orders, eliminating duplicate entry
• Three legacy systems plus NetSuite replaced by one multi-company Odoo database

Key Takeaways for Growing Businesses

Integrate the supply chain you already own

When a hospitality group makes or roasts what it serves, every internal handoff is a transaction. Connecting those handoffs in one system removes double entry at the point where it happens most often, and it gives management a true group-wide view of margin.

Judge an ERP by what actually goes live

A long feature list means little if the rollout stalls. Growing businesses should weigh total cost, implementation track record and day-to-day usability, and talk to peers who have already lived with the system before signing.

Measure success in hours returned to the team

The clearest wins here are operational: faster orders, faster invoicing and a year-end that finishes in days instead of a week. Tracking time saved on specific tasks gives leaders a practical way to confirm that a new platform is paying off.

Technology Stack

Odoo Accounting, Odoo Sales, Odoo Purchase, Odoo Inventory, Odoo Manufacturing, Odoo Quality, Odoo CRM, Odoo Website, Odoo Employees, Odoo.sh

This story is compiled by the ONEXT DIGITAL editorial team from public sources and is shared as an industry reference. Park Avenue Coffee is not an ONEXT DIGITAL client.

Sources: https://www.odoo.com/blog/customer-reviews-6/park-avenue-coffee-transforming-a-passion-into-a-multi-faceted-business-1571