Automating order processing in Exact Online

How orders reach Exact Online today

If you run trade or manufacturing on Exact Online, you know the rhythm. Every morning the order inbox is full: PDF attachments, Excel lists, an email saying "same as last week, but two more boxes" and now and then a photo of a handwritten note. Someone in inside sales opens each message, looks up the customer, looks up the items and types in the sales order. A few minutes per order, a good deal longer when something is unusual.

Exact Online is strong at everything that happens after the sales order: delivery, invoicing, stock and accounting. The part before it, from email to order, is manual work in most companies. EDI solves it for the handful of large customers who send it, not for the long tail who simply email.

What an AI coworker takes over

• Collecting: the agent watches your order address, including orders that reach a sales rep personally and get forwarded.
• Reading: PDF, Excel, email body or scan, in whatever format your customers use.
• Recognising the account: the right customer in Exact Online, even from an unfamiliar sender address or a branch office.
• Matching items: translating customer descriptions and customer item numbers into your item codes.
• Checking: comparing prices, discounts, units and delivery dates with the agreements in Exact Online.
• Creating: staging the sales order or creating it directly, with the right delivery address and the customer's reference.

With a well-configured agent, most orders flow through without anyone touching them. What remains are the orders where something genuinely needs attention.

The connection to Exact Online

An AI coworker works through the official Exact Online REST API, with its own app registration and OAuth authorisation. Nobody is clicking through screens and there is no robot pressing buttons. The agent reads customers, items, price lists and stock, and writes sales orders the way an employee would.

A few practical details decide whether that connection stays stable: tokens that refresh cleanly, respect for the limits on API calls and smart handling of master data, so a single order does not cost dozens of calls. If you run several administrations, the agent picks the right division for each order.

From quotation to sales order

Plenty of orders do not start as orders but as a reply to a quotation: "quote 118 approved, please deliver in week 12". Quotations are stored as separate records in Exact Online, and they are available through the API too. An AI coworker finds the matching quotation, checks whether quantities and prices still hold and converts it into a sales order. If the customer deviates from the quotation, that gets flagged instead of silently accepted.

It works the other way as well. A price request arriving by email becomes a draft quotation for your inside sales team, who review it and send it.

Prices, discounts and exceptions

The hard part of order processing is rarely the reading. It is knowing what is right. A customer orders at last year's price, asks for an item that is being phased out, or orders in boxes while you sell per piece. An AI coworker holds every line up against the agreements in Exact Online and against your own rules: tolerance on price differences, minimum order quantities, substitute items.

When the agent is unsure, it does not guess. The order goes to a colleague with the reason attached: "price is 8 percent off the price list", "item 4410 is blocked, substitute 4412 is in stock". Your team decides, and the agent carries that decision into the next similar order.

What it delivers

• Orders are in Exact Online the same morning, not at the end of the afternoon.
• Fewer after-the-fact corrections on prices, units and delivery addresses.
• Inside sales spends its time on customers and exceptions instead of retyping.
• Peaks, before the holidays or during a promotion, are absorbed without extra hands.

How much it saves depends on your volume and on the share of orders that arrive in free form. The Technotrading customer story shows what that looks like at a technical wholesaler.

What about Exact's own AI?

Exact is building AI features of its own, mostly around accounting: recognising purchase invoices and suggesting postings. That is useful and it does not get in the way of an AI coworker. The difference is scope. An AI coworker works across your mailbox, your customer agreements and Exact Online, and takes over a complete process rather than a single screen.

Getting started

Start by measuring: how many orders arrive per day, in what form, and how many of them does someone touch more than once? In a Quick Scan we look at your real order flow with you and show which share an AI coworker can take over in Exact Online.

Typically an AI coworker is live within eight weeks, connected to your Exact Online administration, with your rules and your team in the loop. Plan your go-live whenever it suits you.