How to Connect Exact Online to Your CRM: A Practical Guide

Why ERP-CRM Integration Matters

Sales teams live in the CRM. Finance lives in Exact Online. Without a connection between the two, someone is manually copying data back and forth, usually the operations manager who has better things to do.

The problems compound quickly. A sales rep closes a deal in Pipedrive but finance does not see it until someone forwards an email. An invoice gets paid in Exact Online but the CRM still shows "awaiting payment" for another three days. A customer changes their billing address on a quote, but the old address ends up on the invoice because nobody updated Exact.

We have built Exact Online integrations for multiple clients across the Netherlands and Belgium. This guide covers what actually works, what breaks, and what approach fits your situation.

What Data Should You Sync

Not everything needs to flow between your ERP and CRM. Start with the data that causes the most pain when it is out of sync.

Contacts and companies. This is the foundation. When a new company is created in Pipedrive, it should appear in Exact Online as a relation, and vice versa. The tricky part is deduplication. You need a shared identifier (usually the KvK number or a custom external ID) to prevent duplicate records from piling up.

Invoices and payment status. Sales teams need to know if their client has outstanding invoices before sending a new proposal. Syncing invoice data and payment status from Exact to the CRM gives sales reps this visibility without needing an Exact login. This is by far the most requested sync we build.

Products and pricing. If you manage your product catalog in Exact Online, syncing it to the CRM means sales reps always quote current prices. Manual price lists in spreadsheets go stale within weeks.

Orders and deals. When a deal closes in the CRM, automatically creating a sales order in Exact eliminates a manual handoff. This is where most companies see the biggest time savings, often 15-30 minutes per order.

Three Approaches to Integration

Manual (spreadsheet export/import)

Cost: free. Reliability: terrible. This is what most companies start with, exporting a CSV from one system and importing it into the other. It works when you have five orders a week. It falls apart at fifty.

Zapier or Make

Cost: EUR 30-80/month. These platforms have Exact Online connectors, though they are more limited than connectors for popular US-centric tools. You can build basic contact syncing and invoice lookups without writing code.

The limitations show up fast. Exact Online's API has strict rate limits -- roughly 60 requests per minute per division. Zapier's per-task pricing also adds up when you are syncing hundreds of records. And the moment you need custom field mapping or multi-step error handling, you are fighting the platform more than using it.

Custom integration (N8N or direct API)

Cost: EUR 3,000-8,000 to build, EUR 20-50/month to host. This is what we recommend for businesses processing more than 50 transactions per week. A custom integration using N8N or direct Python scripts gives you full control over sync logic, error handling, and field mapping.

Custom integrations let you handle the edge cases that off-the-shelf tools cannot: partial shipments, credit notes that need to reverse CRM records, multi-division setups in Exact, and conditional sync rules based on deal type.

The Exact Online OAuth Problem

If you have worked with Exact Online's API, you know the pain. Their OAuth 2.0 implementation is functional but unforgiving.

Access tokens expire after 10 minutes. Your integration needs to automatically refresh tokens before they expire. Miss one refresh cycle and your sync stops.

Refresh tokens expire after 30 days of inactivity. If your integration goes quiet for a month (say, during a holiday period with no new orders), you need to re-authenticate manually through the browser. There is no way around this. We have seen integrations fail silently in January because nobody processed orders during the Christmas break.

Division selection adds complexity. Exact Online supports multiple administrations (divisions) under one account. Every API call needs the correct division ID, and token scope is per-division. If your client has three divisions, you are managing three sets of tokens.

Our approach: we store tokens in an encrypted database, run a heartbeat job that refreshes tokens every 8 minutes regardless of activity, and alert immediately when authentication fails. This has eliminated the "silent failure" problem entirely.

Field Mapping is Where the Real Work Is

The API calls themselves are straightforward. The hard part is deciding how data maps between systems. Exact Online and Pipedrive (or HubSpot) have fundamentally different data models.

A "contact" in Pipedrive can be a person or an organization. In Exact Online, you have separate endpoints for Accounts (companies) and Contacts (people within companies). A "deal" in Pipedrive has stages and values. In Exact, you have sales orders, quotations, and invoices, each with their own workflows.

Document your field mapping before writing a single line of code. Every field that crosses between systems needs a clear rule: which system is the source of truth, how conflicts are resolved, and what happens when a required field in one system is empty in the other.

For a deeper look at mapping patterns and conflict resolution, see our post on system integration best practices.

When to Build Custom vs Use Off the Shelf

This decision comes down to three factors:

1. Transaction volume. Under 50 per week? Zapier or Make will probably work. Over 50? The per-task costs and rate limit constraints push you toward custom.
2. Sync complexity. One-directional contact sync is simple enough for no-code tools. Bidirectional sync with conflict resolution and multi-entity relationships needs custom work.
3. Tolerance for failure. If a missed sync means someone manually enters one invoice, no-code is fine. If it means a client gets the wrong price on a EUR 50,000 order, invest in a robust custom integration.

We wrote a full decision framework in build vs. buy: custom vs off-the-shelf that applies directly here.

Getting Started

If you are running Exact Online alongside a CRM and spending time on manual data entry between them, start by measuring it. Track how many minutes per day your team spends copying data, looking up payment statuses, or creating records in both systems.

That number, multiplied by 22 working days and your hourly cost, is the baseline for calculating whether integration is worth building. For most businesses doing more than a handful of transactions per day, it is. The question is not whether to connect the systems, but which approach fits your scale and budget.