Connecting Exact Online: from finished job to invoice

Where the hours leak away in an installation business

The pattern is the same in almost every installation business. The work order comes in during the afternoon as a photo or a PDF. Someone types it over into the planning in the evening, and later once more into the invoicing. Between the job and the invoice sit two rounds of retyping and a few days of waiting.

That is not a software problem but a handover problem: the same data passes through human hands three times because the systems do not know each other. Addresses get copied wrongly, an hour drops out, and a job from three weeks ago is only invoiced when someone happens to read past it.

How do you make the connection with Exact Online?

You log in with Exact's own official login and grant permission for the parts the integration needs. An access key is kept in your own environment in Amsterdam, encrypted — your password does not appear in it.

You withdraw it at Exact, not with us. Remove the permission there and the connection stops. The key is yours, and that is how it should be.

Switching the integration on costs nothing extra: you pay per number of employees, not per integration.

What runs by itself then?

Four things we set up most often in installation businesses.

The work order out of the mailbox. A work order comes in as a mail or a PDF. The details — customer, address, what was done, hours and materials used — are read out and put into the planning or into a table, and the planner gets a notification. On the industry page for installation businesses this is the first automation, at around three hours a week and no retyping errors in addresses and dates.

The sales invoice that is already waiting. As soon as a job is finished, the invoice is ready in Exact Online: the right relation, the right items, the lines from the work order. You look at it and say yes. If the customer does not exist in Exact yet, a search by name and e-mail address comes first before a new relation is added — that saves duplicate customer records.

Outstanding items that follow themselves up. Exact Online knows which invoices are open. Every Monday a list arrives of what has been open too long, with a draft reminder per customer. Sending is yours to do, or you open it up once and then it runs by itself.

Materials against the order. Order confirmations from the wholesaler are compared with what was ordered; quantities and prices that differ go into a list with a request to look. Around an hour a week, and the difference shows up before the invoice instead of after.

Where do you build in an approval?

The rule of thumb: reading may always run by itself, writing asks for a yes.

An automation that builds an invoice from a work order may do so without intervention — nothing changes in your books yet. The step in which that invoice lands in Exact Online is the step someone looks at. That is one click, and it is the click that makes the difference between automating and losing control.

You can remove that approval later if it turns out there is never anything to remark on. The other way round works worse: a mistake that sits in the books for two months costs more than saying yes two hundred times.

Every step, with or without approval, can be read back in Runs: what was read, what was put ready, who said yes and when.

What it delivers

The honest answer: time, in the place where it costs the most. Three hours a week on work orders and an hour on checking materials are the figures from our own industry page. What happens on top of that is that the invoice goes out days earlier, because it is ready on the day the job is finished instead of at the end of the month.

You do not have to hire anyone extra as the work grows. That is the whole story on price.