I am starting a series on running real accounting on Odoo Community, because most guides assume Enterprise and then skip what is missing. Part one is the part nobody writes: turning it on.
What turning it on takes
You install the Accounting app, pick a chart of accounts for your country, set the taxes you actually charge, and check the journals it created for you. That takes an afternoon — and it is the only part that takes an afternoon.
Then install one more thing: account_usability from OCA's account-financial-tools. Community hides a set of accounting menus and views that Enterprise shows — bank statements, cash registers, account tags and groups, the chart-of-accounts and tax templates, fiscal positions — and this module puts them back, including the "Show Full Accounting Features" group in the user form. It adds no accounting logic of its own; it exposes what is already in your database. Branches exist through 20.0.
Where this falls short
An installer's chart of accounts is a starting point, not your accountant's chart. If you already keep books, moving them means mapping accounts one by one, and that is a decision your accountant owns, not a checkbox. Localisation quality also varies by country — a maintained localisation is the difference between usable and decorative.
And more menus are not more accounting. account_usability gives you the screens; statutory reports for your country come from the localisation, and if that localisation is behind, no usability module will rescue the filing.
What it changes
For a small business: invoices, taxes and bank movements live in software you own, on the version you chose, with no per-user licence fee. The cost simply moves from licence to setup care.
Next in the series: the first invoice!