A film lab that writes its own tools
Anthracite Brussels is the software brand of Charbon Cinéma, a film post-production lab based in Brussels. Our day job is picture and sound: mastering, DCP, restoration.
We have been using Odoo since before Odoo, back when it was still called OpenERP. Which is another way of saying we have seen a few migrations.
We keep our books in it. Every year we file our own annual accounts with the Central Balance Sheet Office and our own returns in Biztax. And every year the same obstacles came back: an export refused over a translated boolean, a return to retype by hand, a history we could not move.
So we wrote the tools we were missing. Not for a market, for ourselves. They run on our own filings and we compare them against filings that were actually accepted. Watching them work year after year is what made us think they could be useful to others.
We are not selling a miracle for all that. These modules save time. They do not replace an accountant and they do not excuse you from proofreading what you file.
The name says the idea: anthracite is the densest coal, the one that burns without smoke.