CUSTOM SOFTWARE

Automating Exact Online: the four flows that deliver the most

At many businesses Exact Online is the administrative core. The manual work sits around it: retyping orders, hours from Excel, exports for a report.

Why so much manual work remains around Exact.

Exact Online does what it is meant to do: bookkeeping. The manual work is in everything that happens before it. An order comes in through the website or by email. Someone reads it, retypes the details and creates an invoice. Every step is a person, and every step is a chance of an error or a delay.

Switching to a bigger package rarely solves that. The data sits fine in Exact; getting it there is the problem. Exact Online has an API that lets an integration read and create contacts, orders and invoices. You build on that, without replacing Exact.

1. Orders from your website or mailbox to Exact.

Nobody needs to retype an order from your online shop or an order sent by email. The integration extracts the customer, items, quantities and prices and prepares a sales order or draft invoice in Exact. Anything doubtful, such as an unknown customer or an item that does not exist, goes to a person. The rest carries on.

2. Hours without an intermediate file.

If your hours are in a separate system or in Excel, someone retypes them into Exact every month. That intermediate file is the weak spot: it is always slightly out of date. A direct integration puts approved hours on the right project, so that what was worked and what is invoiced no longer drift apart.

3. An overview that keeps itself up to date.

The reports in Exact are made for the accountant. As a business owner you often want to see something else: revenue per customer this month, outstanding items older than thirty days, margin per project. If you run an export for that every week now, you will benefit from an overview that reads directly from Exact and is correct every morning.

4. A check on what is missing.

The dullest flow, and often the quickest win. A daily check that shows what is missing: invoices without a cost centre, contacts without a VAT number, orders that have been open for two weeks. You get a short list instead of a search at the end of the month.

When an integration is too much.

If you process a few orders a week, retyping may cost you a quarter of an hour a day. An integration then pays for itself slowly. The same applies if your way of working still changes every quarter: an integration on a process that is not settled has to be rebuilt again and again.

Sometimes it is simpler. A better template or a standard export in Exact itself may be enough. Start there if you are unsure.

What TrompTech does here.

We build an Exact Online integration as custom work, around the software you already have. The example on the custom software page, an online shop connected to Exact, starts at €9,500. Custom work usually costs between €3,500 and €12,000, then €249 per month for maintenance. You get a fixed price up front. All amounts exclude VAT.

If you use another accounting package, such as Moneybird, SnelStart or e-Boekhouden, the approach is the same, as long as the package allows an integration.

Custom software usually costs between €3,500 and €12,000, then €249 per month for maintenance, excluding VAT.