From Exact or Yuki to a dashboard that refreshes itself

Exact and Yuki do what they are supposed to do. They keep your books correct, they make your filings possible, they close your financial year. That is the work they were built for.

What they are not is a steering instrument. And yet they are often the only place where the numbers come together, so the question arrives by itself: can we get that data out and turn it into something living?

Yes. But of all the connections I have built, Exact was by far the hardest.

Why Exact is the most work

Four things make it heavier than it looks.

Authentication runs through OAuth, with tokens that expire and have to be refreshed. That is standard enough in itself, but it does mean your connection is a process that has to be maintained, not a setting you fill in once.

There are limits on the number of queries you are allowed to make. So you cannot simply pull everything whenever you feel like it. You have to shape your collection strategy around that: a full load first, then only what has changed.

The endpoints are scattered. What you think of as one thing, a sale with its lines and its customer, has to be gathered from several places.

And then there is the context of administrations and divisions. Anyone with several legal entities or departments in Exact has to know, with every query, which context they are in. Forget that and you quietly pull the wrong set, which you only notice when someone fails to recognize a total.

On top of that comes the logic of Exact itself: how bookings are structured, how journals work, how a credit note relates to the original invoice. You need to understand that before you hang conclusions on it.

Yuki is a different story

Yuki is simpler in design and therefore faster to connect, but you also get less detail out of it. For a business that mainly wants to follow its cost structure and its result, that is fine. If you want to go down to the article level or to the individual sales line, you will have to get that elsewhere.

That is not a shortcoming of Yuki. It follows from what an accounting package keeps. Accounting aggregates, that is its function.

What an accounting package will never give you

Here is the real point, and it matters more than which connection you choose.

Your accounting keeps the result of what happened, at the level of detail the tax authorities and the law require. It does not keep why.

How many people walked in is not in there. How many of them bought something is not in there. Items per transaction, no. Which marketing spend caused which sale, no. Who visited which customer, no.

Those are exactly the numbers you steer with. So a connection to your accounting package gives you a correct but narrow picture. Useful as a base, insufficient as the whole.

How you set it up in practice

Pull the data periodically through the official interface and write it into your own database. Do not query the accounting package straight from Power BI, because then you run into the limits and you depend on availability at the moment someone opens a report.

Pull everything the first time, then only what has changed. Keep the old versions as well instead of overwriting them, because otherwise you lose any way to see how something developed.

Put a check on it that warns you when the collection failed. A connection that quietly stops is worse than no connection, because then you are looking at last week's numbers assuming they are today's.

And settle from day one how you define revenue against what sits in the accounting. Including or excluding VAT, before or after credit notes, on invoice date or on delivery date. Those choices decide whether your dashboard and your accountant will ever contradict each other again.

What it delivers

At one retailer the chain now pulls forty-eight times a day. Not because it has to, but because it can once the process is running. Numbers down to the day and down to the invoice, with five years of history behind them, and a signal when something deviates by more than twenty percent.

The difference with before is not the speed of the report. It is that nobody has to look at it any more to know that something is off.

The claim

Connecting your accounting package is worth doing, but it is half the work. The numbers you steer with are, by definition, not in your accounting.