Lost Property
Lost Property gives venues, offices, campuses and transport desks a found-item register, private lost reports, explainable candidate matching and a controlled return or disposition process. Staff remain responsible for ownership decisions and organizational retention policy.
Installation and first setup
Install corvus_lost_property on Odoo 20. The addon depends on Discuss (mail) and uses native users, companies, photos, activities and reports. It needs no hotel module, external service or hardware integration.
Installation and the custody, claim, retention and company-access workflows have been tested on Odoo 20 Enterprise. Standard Community dependencies are used; Community edition has not been qualified.
Open Lost Property > Configuration as a Manager. Review the supplied categories, operational retention defaults and location labels before use. The examples are 30 days for Clothing and Accessories, Keys and Small Items, and Other Property, and 60 days for Personal Electronics. These are editable operating defaults, not legal retention periods. Categories are shared; locations may be shared or company-specific. The supplied Main Reception label is shared. Create meaningful site locations and physical storage conventions for your desk.
New intakes receive an LP/year/number reference and matching storage label unless you supply another unique company label. Private reports receive an LR/year/number reference. Sequences and normal category defaults are preserved on upgrades.
Roles and claimant privacy
Assign a Lost Property role in user settings:
- Property Desk records found items, updates storage and custodians, requests disposition, records approved disposition, and reads custody reports. Desk staff cannot read private lost reports, claimant names or contacts, verification notes, or collection acknowledgements.
- Claims Officer includes Desk access and also records private lost reports, reviews candidates, confirms matches, records verification outcomes and collection acknowledgements, and completes already authorized collections.
- Manager includes Claims Officer access and authorizes or revokes release, approves or cancels disposition, adjusts retention dates with reasons, and maintains configuration.
Users only access records in their authorized selected companies. A custodian must be an internal Property Desk user authorized for the intake company. Managers can perform both verification and approval; the addon does not impose two-person separation.
Claimant information is held in a separate restricted model. Private reports have no shared chatter or document-copy upload field. Verification and acknowledgement notes stay private. The shared item chatter and printable custody reports omit those fields. Do not enter personal identifiers in shared descriptions, photographs, storage labels or operational notes; free-text fields do not automatically detect sensitive content. A photograph should show the object, not an identity document or its owner.
Receive a found item
- Open Lost Property > Found Property and create an intake.
- Enter a concise title and distinguishing description, category, discovery location and actual found time. The time cannot be in the future.
- Assign the custodian, a storage label and the actual cabinet, locker or shelf. Upload an object photo if helpful using the photo field.
- Save. The item starts In Custody and is active. Its keep-through date is the UTC found date plus the category's current retention days.
The retention period is copied at intake. Later category-policy changes do not rewrite existing deadlines. Correcting an unclaimed item's category or found time recalculates its default deadline. Use a manager's Adjust Retention action for a deliberate exception with a retained reason. Keep-through means the item becomes overdue on the following day.
Identity, photo and discovery facts can be corrected only while the item is unclaimed in custody. Storage and custodian can change while custody continues. Once collected or disposed, the record remains as history and may be archived; it cannot be deleted.
Record a private lost report and review candidates
A Claims Officer opens Private Lost Reports, enters the missing item's category, description, lost date and optional location, and records the minimum claimant name and contact needed. A future lost date is rejected.
Choose Find Candidate Items. Candidates must be active and unclaimed, in the same company and category, and found from three days before to fourteen days after the reported lost date. Discovery dates are evaluated in UTC. An optional exact-location filter narrows the results. At most 200 candidates are returned; refine category or location if there are more.
The score is deliberately simple: 50 points for category eligibility, 10 for the same UTC date or 5 for another date in the window, 25 for the same location, and up to 15 for shared English description words of at least three characters. Common words are ignored. The explanation lists the clues. This is a comparison aid, not facial recognition, identity matching, or an ownership decision.
After inspecting the candidate and the claimant's description, select Confirm Match. The found item becomes Claim Matched and the report becomes Matched. The item is reserved to that report; another report cannot claim it simultaneously. Verification is still pending.
Verify, authorize and collect
- On the matched item, a Claims Officer selects Verify Claim. Record Verified or Not Verified and a minimal rationale, such as distinctive characteristics described before seeing the item. Identity-document copies or numbers are not requested.
- Verification attempts are retained privately. A rejected attempt may be followed by another attempt; the current outcome must be Verified for release.
- A Manager reviews the outcome and selects Authorize Release. The item becomes Release Authorized and the approving staff member and timestamp are retained.
- At collection, a Claims Officer selects Record Collection, confirms that acknowledgement was received and records a minimal private acknowledgement note. This is a staff-recorded acknowledgement, not an electronic-signature service.
- The item and private report become Collected. The shared custody record shows the collection time, staff member and acknowledgement flag; the private note remains on the report. Repeated release or collection attempts are rejected.
For a mismatch before approval, use Remove Match with a reason. The report reopens and the item returns to custody; verification history remains. If release was already authorized, a Manager first uses Revoke Release with a private reason. That returns the item to Claim Matched with a Not Verified outcome, requiring another review or removal of the match. Collected records are terminal; there is no button that silently reopens physical custody.
An open report with no item can be closed using a closure reason and reopened later. Claimant details and item descriptions cannot change while the report is matched or collected; remove an unapproved match first if the original report was wrong.
Retention reminders and disposition
The daily scheduled action processes up to 100 overdue, unreminded items across the assigned cron user's authorized companies. It creates one native internal To Do activity for the custodian. It covers items in normal custody, matched items and items authorized for collection. Completing an activity does not automatically dispose of an item or repeatedly generate the same reminder. Adjusting a deadline updates the linked reminder date. Completing collection or disposition closes the retention reminder while preserving its completed activity history.
Use the Retention Review Due filter to see overdue custody regardless of scheduled-action timing. An overdue active claim must be reviewed through the claim workflow; it cannot be sent directly to disposition.
For an unclaimed overdue item:
- A Desk user chooses Request Disposition, selects a method and records an operational reason. Methods include transfer to site authority, donation, recycling, destruction and other.
- A Manager reviews local policy and selects Authorize Disposition. Approval alone does not record physical disposal.
- Staff execute the approved handling, then select Record Disposition and enter an execution note. The record becomes Disposed, with staff and timestamp retained.
A Manager can cancel a pending or authorized disposition with a reason, returning the item to normal custody. This is useful when a late claim needs review. Actual disposed records cannot be released or disposed a second time. No external donation, transfer or disposal service is contacted by the addon.
Lists, reports and worked example
The found-item list shows discovery, category, location, storage, custodian, keep-through date and status. Search by reference, title, description, label, category, location or custodian. Filter items still in custody, unclaimed items, overdue retention, ready collections, disposition requests or archived records. Group by category, status, location or custodian.
The private-report list is available only to claims staff. It supports open, matched and not-verified filters. The candidate wizard explains each result before confirmation.
Print Found Property Custody Sheet for an item to show intake facts, approval and outcome timestamps, acknowledgement flag and operational history. Select several items and print Found Property Register for a company-grouped register with selected-record counts by custody, collected and disposed status. Counts describe the selected records, not every item in the database. Both reports omit claimant names, contacts, private verification notes and private acknowledgement text.
Native HTML report rendering has been verified. PDF output requires a working Odoo server PDF engine and has not been qualified on the tested target.
The optional fictional Riverside Centre demo includes a blue scarf with a not-verified claim, an unclaimed umbrella, collected earbuds, a charger authorized for collection, a pending key disposition, disposed gloves and an overdue book. Open the charger to see the approved release awaiting acknowledgement. Open the earbud custody sheet to see a complete collection without exposing its private claim.
Upgrades and troubleshooting
Normal categories, locations, sequences and the scheduled action use non-updatable reference data. User-edited category retention days and sequence prefixes survive upgrade; existing intake deadlines and custody records are retained. Back up your database and filestore using your normal process before upgrading.
If a candidate is missing, check company, category, UTC date window, location filtering, active status and whether it already has a claim or disposition request. If release is blocked, check current verification and Manager approval. If collection is blocked, confirm authorization and acknowledgement. If disposition is blocked, confirm that the keep-through date has passed and there is no active claim. If reminders do not appear, inspect the daily scheduled action, its assigned user's company access and the item's existing reminder flag. Desk users seeing no private-report menu is expected access control.
Set your own rules for claim evidence, local retention, personal-data handling and physical custody. The addon makes no legal ownership, jurisdictional compliance or automatic identity-verification claims.
Support: Corvus Nexus Technologies LTD, support@corvusnexus.com. Website: https://corvusnexus.com. Include the addon/Odoo version, workflow step and sanitized error details; omit credentials and claimant personal data.
Availability
This guide covers the Odoo 20 package. Older-version packages are not part of this release.