Where culture meets operational complexity
Hart Haarlem is a major cultural and events venue in the city of Haarlem, in the Dutch province of North Holland. The venue hosts theater performances, concerts, conferences, and a range of community and cultural events. It also offers rental space to external organizations and businesses, manages subsidy-funded cultural projects, and runs an online shop alongside its venue activities.
This multi-revenue-stream model is what makes Hart Haarlem an interesting Odoo project. Most cultural venues run one primary system — a ticketing platform or a venue booking tool — and patch the gaps with spreadsheets and separate invoicing software. Hart Haarlem chose a different path: one integrated platform for everything.
Events and ticketing
The Odoo Events module was configured to handle Hart Haarlem’s programming calendar: individual performances, multi-day festivals, and recurring series. Each event has its own capacity, pricing tiers, and associated resources. Ticket sales flow directly into accounting, eliminating manual reconciliation between a ticketing system and a separate finance tool.
For the programming team, working in the same system as finance means that revenue reporting per event is available in real time — no waiting for an export or a monthly reconciliation. For the finance team, every ticket sale, cancellation, and refund is accounted for automatically.
Venue rental and the client portal
Hall rental is a significant revenue stream for Hart Haarlem. Regular hirers — companies, cultural organizations, and event producers who use the venue repeatedly — needed a way to view their bookings, access invoices, and manage their relationship with the venue without needing to call or email for every piece of information.
FANATICS built a custom client portal on top of Odoo’s standard Customer Portal. Regular clients log in and see their upcoming and past bookings, download invoices, and view the status of their rental agreements. For hirers who use Hart Haarlem regularly across a season, this self-service capability represents a meaningful reduction in administrative back-and-forth.
The CRM module supports the commercial side of venue rental: tracking prospects, managing relationships with regular clients, and monitoring the pipeline for larger events and corporate bookings.
Subsidized projects
Cultural organizations in the Netherlands often operate a mix of commercial and subsidy-funded activities. Hart Haarlem manages a portfolio of cultural projects that are partly or wholly funded by municipal or provincial grants. The Projects module tracks hours, costs, and deliverables per project, providing the documentation required for subsidy reporting.
eCommerce and ongoing operations
Hart Haarlem’s online shop — selling merchandise, gift vouchers, and related products — runs through the Odoo eCommerce module, integrated with the same inventory and accounting foundation as the rest of the platform. Orders placed online flow directly into fulfillment and finance.
The system went live in 2025 and is actively in use as of 2026. Hart Haarlem continues to expand its use of the platform as the team grows more familiar with the system’s capabilities.
Read more: Odoo for culture & events · All cases