The number you cannot ignore
Six percent. That is the share of SME entrepreneurs who say they are sufficiently automated. The remaining 94% see opportunities but fail to act on them, according to the Exact SME Barometer 2025. For webshop entrepreneurs that is extra painful, because there everything revolves around speed and volume.
While your orders come in through WooCommerce, Shopify or Bol.com, you spend your evenings retyping invoices into Exact Online. Sound familiar? Then you are not alone. And it costs you more than you think.
What manual administration really costs you
Most webshop entrepreneurs underestimate how much time leaks away on administrative tasks. Not because they are foolish, but because it happens gradually. Five minutes per order. Ten orders per day. That adds up to almost a full working day per week of typing.
But time is only the beginning. There are three areas where manual processing hits you.
Time you never get back
An average webshop with 30 to 50 orders per day spends 8 to 12 hours each week manually entering sales invoices, updating stock and matching bank statements. Those are hours you could put into marketing, product development or simply an evening off.
More than half of SMEs, 52% to be precise, name cost saving as the main reason to automate. Not innovation, not growth. Simply: wasting less money on work a system can do better.
Errors that eat into your revenue
Manual entry is error prone. A wrong VAT rate, a decimal in the wrong place, an order booked twice. Every mistake takes time to correct and can lead to problems with your VAT return.
With 500 orders per month and an error margin of 2% you are talking about 10 incorrect entries. Per month. That means 120 faulty lines per year that your administration has to sort out, or that go unnoticed until the accountant comes by.
Growth you cannot handle
This is perhaps the biggest risk. Manual processes do not scale. At 20 orders per day it is manageable. At 50 it starts to pinch. At 100 it is unsustainable.
And then there is the staffing problem. 69% of medium-sized companies in the Netherlands face a labour shortage, according to Statistics Netherlands. Hiring someone for your administration is therefore not only expensive, that person is often simply not to be found.
What this looks like by company size
The impact of manual administration differs depending on the phase your webshop is in. But the bottleneck is universal.
The starter (up to 20 orders per day)
You do everything yourself. Packing and shipping orders during the day, the bookkeeping in the evening. It works, but you miss the space to think about growth. Automating your webshop administration is somewhere on your list, but there are always more urgent things.
The risk: you get used to it. Working manually feels like "keeping control", while it is actually a brake.
The grower (20 to 80 orders per day)
The first cracks start to show. You miss an invoice now and then, the stock in Exact Online no longer matches your webshop, and your partner or employee complains that the administration eats up too much time.
This is the tipping point. Here entrepreneurs decide either to automate or to hire an administrative employee. That last option quickly costs €2,500 to €3,000 per month, for work a connector can do for a fraction of that amount.
The scale-up (80+ orders per day)
Without automation this phase is a nightmare. Multiple sales channels, returns, different VAT rates for foreign customers. Keeping track by hand is no longer an option.
Still, there are webshops that try. They then have two or three people working on the administration and are still running behind. The error rates climb, the accountant sends increasingly long correction lists, and the quarterly closing becomes an annual trauma.
What automation means in practice
Automating your webshop administration means your webshop and Exact Online communicate with each other continuously. Orders, invoices, payments and stock changes are synchronised automatically, without you having to look at it.
A connector between your webshop and Exact Online makes sure every order is automatically recorded as a sales invoice. With the right VAT codes, on the right ledger account, linked to the right debtor. Updated every five minutes.
This applies to all common platforms. Whatever you use, WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento or Lightspeed, the connector picks it up. Do you also sell through Bol.com or Amazon? Then those orders are processed in the same way, including commission settlement and returns.
The installation does not cost you an afternoon. Most entrepreneurs have the connector running within ten minutes. Plug and play, without technical knowledge. And if you prefer some guidance, there is an installation service that goes through it with you.
That means no manual retyping. No forgotten invoices. No stock differences between your shop and your bookkeeping. And no evenings behind Excel.
The real question
It is not about whether you should automate. That 94% has known for a long time. It is about when, and what it costs you to wait.
Every month you book by hand, you lose hours you could put into your business. Every mistake you make costs money to fix. And every chance to grow is limited by the capacity of your administration.
The technology is here. Connectors between platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento and Lightspeed with Exact Online exist and work. They process your orders automatically and keep your bookkeeping updated in real time. From €9.95 per month.
The question is not whether it is possible. The question is how long you keep putting yourself through doing it by hand.
Curious how much time you can save? View our webshop connectors →
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