Bookkeeping is a requirement for every business. Having your financial processes in order contributes to a successful company. Accounting software helps achieve this and is therefore a given for businesses today. One of the most popular options is Exact Online (hereafter Exact): an accounting application that resides entirely in the cloud.
By Koen, data engineer at Datalab
You could write many blogs about the capabilities and properties of Exact (and these can be found online). In this blog, however, I focus not on what happens at the front end of the software, but on the 'back end' - the place where, after uploading information into Exact, you can retrieve the data from the system again.
From Datalab, we work with many companies that need to extract this data. They want to combine it with data from other systems (CRM, tax software, webshops, etc.) and use it for reporting and analyses. In this blog, I explain how you can extract data from Exact, why this can be challenging for non-technical people, and discuss a commonly used solution: a connector. I weigh its pros and cons and present a much better alternative: the data warehouse.
Unlocking data from Exact Online
Exact Online offers users the ability to extract their own information from the system. One method is direct export from the user interface. With the press of a button, an Excel or CSV file rolls out of Exact, which the user can then work with. This suffices for a one-off situation but is not practical when structural reporting and analyses are the goal.
For this situation, Exact offers a so-called API - an interface for communicating with Exact, intended for automated processes. Via the API, it is possible - without human intervention - to unlock data from the system. Very handy when you have a dashboard and want to refresh the data automatically.
Unlocking data centrally in a data warehouse opens up many possibilities, such as analyses and dashboards with the right data in one overview.
Directly using the API is a (technical) step too far for the average Exact user. The Exact Online API is a well-developed but relatively strict API. It has many 'rules' a programme must adhere to before retrieving data. Some examples:
- The amount of data you may retrieve (so-called 'rate limits'): there are limits on the amount of data you may retrieve per administration/minute/day.
- The time period in which a programme is granted access to data: after a programme is granted access, it has a maximum of 10 minutes before access is revoked. Access must then be requested again.
- The intensity with which data is retrieved: when you retrieve data intensively or frequently make errors during retrieval, Exact may slow down data retrieval or even temporarily block it.
To set up a fully automated process that accounts for all these aspects, you need considerable technical knowledge and skills. That is why businesses often purchase ready-made software that establishes the connection with the API for them - a so-called connector.
Connectors
Because many businesses are unable to access Exact's API themselves, a connector is widely used. This ready-made software automatically establishes a connection between the API and an analysis or reporting tool, for example a dashboard. A well-built connector respects the API rules and ensures smooth data loading.
Purchasing a connector has advantages. It is a simple and accessible way to extract your data from Exact. This makes it attractive for companies just starting with dashboards. Unfortunately, connectors also have shortcomings. They often do not meet user requirements when it comes to the frequency and speed at which data needs to be refreshed. An example from our own experience concerns a business whose changes in Exact only appeared in their dashboard the next day.
Another important shortcoming of a connector is only felt when data from Exact needs to be validated, transformed and/or combined with data from other sources - such as information from a CRM system, tax software systems, webshops and more. Generally, a connector loads Exact data directly into a dashboard, meaning these steps can only take place in the tool itself. The major disadvantage is that dashboard tools are often inefficient and slow at this. Data processing is better performed in other tools, so that a dashboard can do what it is good at: visualising and presenting. This is perhaps the most important reason to choose a data warehouse.
Data warehouse
Datalab offers clients a data warehouse as an alternative to a connector. Instead of a direct connection between Exact and a dashboard, we set up processes that first move the data to a data warehouse. The processes ensure that data stays up to date with Exact at a frequency necessary for the goals a client wants to achieve. Once in the data warehouse, data can easily be validated, transformed and combined with information from other sources that have been unlocked in the data warehouse. Result: ready-made datasets that are efficiently prepared for loading into a dashboard or other reporting tool - combined data, that is.
Improving and professionalising reporting is just one possibility a data warehouse offers. Once data from Exact - and other sources - is processed in the data warehouse, much broader applications can be considered. Options include preventively signalling deviating or missing financial data from a business, performing checks by combining it with tax information, automatically alerting clients/employees to this, and/or proactively getting ahead of problems by predicting them. Does this appeal to you? Do not hesitate to contact us.