Connecting Exact Online: it starts with which administration you mean
An Exact Online integration is available from us on request. There is no off-the-shelf integration you switch on, and we are not a partner or certified supplier of Exact. What does exist: an AI colleague that handles email and WhatsApp Business, and an intake call in which we work out whether reading along in your administration is possible and actually needed. This page describes what Exact’s API asks of you, so you can weigh that up before anything gets built.
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Does this integration already exist?
Status of this integration: on request. That means literally that it does not exist until someone asks for it — no module, no toggle in a settings screen, no version already running somewhere. After the intake call we decide together whether it gets built, what exactly it may retrieve, and how much build time that takes. If a supplier tells you such an integration "already exists", ask which administration it runs in today.
What the rest of the site says about this, it says consistently: integrations are custom work and follow the intake call. What an AI colleague does do today is handle email and WhatsApp Business. So everything below describes what an integration would require, not something sitting ready.
What the Exact Online API asks before anything can be read
| Part of the API | What Exact’s documentation says |
|---|---|
| Administration in every URL | Nearly every resource URI carries a division parameter; it determines which administration you read |
| Records per page | Most endpoints return 60 per page; the bulk and sync endpoints return 1000 |
| Recommended way to read | Exact recommends using the sync endpoints wherever possible |
| Notification on changes | A subscription per topic, for example Accounts, Items or StockPositions |
| Available from Novot AI? | On request — not built, not configured, and we are not an Exact partner |
The division code: why Exact starts with which administration you mean
Exact Online is built around administrations, and the API shows it immediately: nearly every resource URI carries a division parameter, and that parameter states which administration is being accessed. Anyone with several legal entities, several branches or a separate holding company in Exact therefore has several codes. An integration pointing at the wrong one throws no error — it neatly reads data from a set of books that has nothing to do with the question.
So that is the first question in an intake call: how many administrations are there, and which of them may an AI colleague consult. That is not a technical detail but a boundary. It determines what comes into view at all, and what stays out of view structurally — and with an accounting package the second half matters as much as the first.
What lives in an Exact administration that touches customer contact
Exact’s reference documentation lists the endpoints per service: accounts and contacts under CRM, quotations under quotes, the general ledger and outstanding items under the financial services, items and stock positions under logistics. For customer contact only a handful of those lists matter. "Has my invoice been processed" touches outstanding items; "send me that quotation again" touches quotations; "do you have that item in stock" touches stock positions. The rest of the administration is none of an AI colleague’s business.
That distinction matters, because the temptation is to make an integration as broad as possible. Reading broadly is technically the easiest option and legally the least sensible: you end up retrieving personal data you do not need to answer the question. We would rather put that boundary into the integration itself than into a promise, because only the first of those can be verified.
How to read Exact without weighing the administration down
In that same documentation Exact states that most endpoints have a page size of 60, that the bulk and sync endpoints deliver 1000, and that it is recommended to use the sync endpoints where possible. That is exactly the difference between an integration that re-fetches the entire account list every morning and one that only asks what has changed since yesterday. The second costs less and goes stale less quickly.
For changes that cannot wait, Exact offers webhook subscriptions: you subscribe to a topic — Accounts, Items, StockPositions — and Exact sends a message as soon as something happens there. Use that, and you do not have to ask every fifteen minutes whether there is news. It saves more than traffic; it removes the lag between "the status changed" and "the customer hears about it".
Exact also publishes limits on the number of calls per administration. Those live in a knowledge base that only reveals its content after running scripts, which means we cannot cite it as a source; so we do not quote those numbers here. What does matter for your decision: a new integration shares that budget with everything else attached to your Exact — your bookkeeper, a scan-and-recognise service, a webshop connector. Whoever eats the budget notices it not in the AI colleague but in the invoicing run that stalls overnight.
What we need before we can say anything sensible about this
- Which administrations exist in Exact Online, and which of them an AI colleague may consult.
- The questions you look up by hand in Exact today in order to answer a customer — that is the only honest measure of what an integration is worth.
- Who else is already attached to your Exact: the bookkeeper, a scanning service, a webshop. They share the call budget with any new integration.
- Clarity on who may grant access on your side; an integration reads along under a user with the rights to do so, and that choice is yours, not ours.
Our way of working, from intake call to delivery, is described in our approach. What is not there and is here: an accounting integration is not a goal in itself. For the majority of incoming questions — opening hours, lead times, whether someone will call back — nothing has to come out of Exact at all. The integration only pays for itself on the questions that genuinely live in there: has this invoice been settled, what was in that quotation, which item was delivered.
What applies legally once an integration pulls personal data out of a package — retrieve no more than you need, and record who the controller is — is set out in AI and the GDPR for SMEs. Which channels an AI colleague serves with us is covered on the channel page about email.