Odoo · ERP · Peru
How to choose an ERP for an importing company in Peru
For an importing company, the ERP decision comes down to one question: can it build a landed cost you trust, and post it to accounting without a spreadsheet in the middle.
Last updated: September 2026
Weight of each item
How each item is contracted
Landed cost is the whole problem
The purchase price is the easy part. Freight, insurance, customs duties, port charges, storage, local transport and customs agent fees all have to reach the product cost, often arriving weeks after the goods. A system that cannot distribute those costs across the shipment leaves margin calculations permanently approximate.
Exchange rate discipline
Purchases in dollars, sales in soles, payments at a third rate. The requirement is not sophistication but consistency: one rate source, applied the same way in purchasing, inventory valuation and accounting, with FX differences posting to accounts somebody reviews.
Shipment traceability
Which order, which shipment, which customs declaration, which warehouse receipt. Importers that cannot answer this quickly tend to discover cost errors only when a margin looks wrong at the end of a quarter.
Peruvian statutory requirements
Electronic invoicing, detracciones on certain services, withholdings and perceptions, and the statutory registers. For importers, the perception regime on imports and the treatment of customs documents are worth confirming explicitly during scoping.
What to test in a demo
Do not evaluate the module list. Bring one real shipment, with its real cost documents arriving at different dates, and ask the vendor to show the resulting product cost and the journal entries. Most differences between candidates become obvious in that exercise.
If landed cost requires a spreadsheet, the ERP has not solved the importer's actual problem.
Frequently asked questions
Does Odoo handle landed cost?
Yes, cost distribution across receipts is standard functionality. The configuration work is agreeing which cost categories exist, how they are distributed, and which accounts they post to.
What about costs that arrive after the goods are sold?
They have to be handled explicitly, with an agreed accounting treatment. This is a decision to take during design, not an edge case to discover later.
Is a specialised import system better?
Sometimes, for very high volumes or highly specific customs processes. For most importers the particularity sits in two or three points that an integrated ERP resolves with configuration or a contained development.