You know the process. Sales closes a deal in the CRM. Sends an email to finance. Finance opens Exact Online, looks up the customer, creates an invoice, retypes the products, checks the VAT rate and clicks send. Twenty minutes of work, for every single deal.
Now the version with a connector. Sales closes a deal. The invoice is in Exact Online. Sent. Done. No email, no retyping, no delay. The difference is letting a quote turn into an invoice automatically through a connector between your CRM and Exact Online. And how that works technically (without you having to write any code yourself) is what we explain here step by step.
Under the hood an automatic connector goes through seven steps. Each of those steps replaces something that happens manually today.
Your sales rep fills in the deal as always. Customer name, products, quantities, prices. In HubSpot these are line items, in Salesforce Products with PricebookEntries, in Pipedrive deal fields with products. The data you need for an invoice already exists at this point.
The sales rep moves the deal to the won stage. In HubSpot you change the pipeline stage, in Salesforce you set the Opportunity to Closed Won, in Pipedrive you drag the deal to the won column. This single moment, the stage change, is the starting signal.
As soon as the deal status changes, the connector picks this up. With HubSpot and Salesforce through a polling mechanism or webhook, with Pipedrive through a real-time webhook. The connector knows: this deal is won, an invoice needs to be created.
Before an invoice can be created, the customer must exist in Exact Online. The connector searches based on company name, Chamber of Commerce number or email address to see whether the contact already exists. If so: connect it. If not: create it automatically with the data from the CRM. Think of the name, address, VAT number and payment condition.
This is the core. The connector creates a sales invoice in Exact Online with the right customer, products, quantities and amounts. Every line item from your CRM becomes an invoice line. The invoice is ready within seconds, complete with the right VAT rate and the agreed payment condition.
Depending on your settings in Exact Online, the invoice is automatically sent to the customer by email. No manual action needed.
When the customer pays, Exact Online records the payment. The connector sends that status back to your CRM. Sales sees straight away in the deal whether the invoice has been paid, without having to call finance.
The basic flow is the same, but the details differ per platform.
HubSpot works with deals, pipeline stages and line items. Commerce Hub CPQ generates quotes with products and prices, but the step to Exact Online is missing in HubSpot itself.
With a connector it goes like this: the deal moves to the won stage, the connector reads the line items (product, quantity, price), checks whether the contact exists in Exact and creates a sales invoice. Product codes are matched between HubSpot and Exact Online, so the right item ends up on the invoice.
HubSpot's Breeze AI and the "Run Agent" workflow action make it increasingly easy to automate actions within HubSpot. But as soon as data needs to reach your bookkeeping, you need a connector.
Salesforce works with Opportunities, Products and PricebookEntries. When an Opportunity reaches Closed Won, the connector reads the linked products with prices. The contact is searched for or created in Exact, and the invoice follows automatically.
With Agentforce and Data 360, Salesforce is getting smarter at qualifying and following up on leads. But the bridge to Exact Online, that is what the connector takes care of.
Pipedrive sends a real-time webhook on a stage change. That means no delay. As soon as the deal is set to won, the connector picks it up straight away. Products and amounts are read out and translated into invoice lines in Exact Online.
Pipedrive has its own Invoicing App Extension, but those invoices live in the Pipedrive ecosystem. They do not reach your bookkeeping. With a connector to Exact Online they do.
The flow sounds simple, but behind the scenes four things are solved that you would otherwise have to do manually.
What if sales puts a product on a deal that does not yet exist in Exact Online? The connector can create the product automatically based on the CRM data: name, price, product code. Or you choose to have the connector send a notification so you create the product yourself first. Which approach fits depends on how tightly you want to manage your item master data.
HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive have no VAT logic. They work with amounts, not with VAT codes. Exact Online, on the other hand, needs to know for every invoice line which VAT rate applies: 0%, 9% or 21%.
The connector solves this by mapping VAT codes based on product group, customer type or the buyer's country. A domestic sale automatically gets the standard rate. An EU delivery gets the correct ICP code. That prevents errors you would otherwise only discover at the VAT return.
In your CRM it says "Net 30" or "pay within 14 days". Exact Online works with internal payment condition codes. The connector translates the CRM condition into the right code in Exact. That way every invoice gets the agreed payment term, without finance having to set it manually.
If you work internationally, deals come in in different currencies. Exact Online distinguishes between the invoice amount in the original currency and the amount converted to your administration currency. The connector makes sure both amounts are filled in correctly, so your bookkeeping is right regardless of whether the deal was closed in euros, dollars or pounds.
The calculation is simple. At 50 deals per month, finance spends an average of 10 to 15 minutes per invoice transferring data. That is 8 to 12 hours a month of pure administrative work.
With a connector that disappears. But it is not only about hours. It is about speed. An invoice that goes out the same day instead of three to five working days later shortens your effective payment term. At 50 invoices a month that saves 150 to 250 waiting days. That is cash flow you have in your account sooner.
And then there are the mistakes you no longer make. Wrong amount typed over? No longer happens. Forgot to adjust the VAT rate? The connector does it automatically. Invoice sent to the old address? The data comes from your CRM in real time.
You do not need a developer. The connectors from iWebDevelopment are no-code, you configure them through a dashboard. The steps:
The connectors can be cancelled monthly, so you can try it without risk.
The step from quote to invoice is the most repetitive action in the collaboration between sales and finance. And it is exactly the type of work you do not want to keep doing manually. The data already exists. The connector makes sure that data ends up in the right place at the right moment.
Anyone who wants to automate the entire customer cycle (from first contact to payment) starts here. At the moment the deal is won and the invoice creates itself.
Want to know more about the security of your data? The connectors from iWebDevelopment are ISO 27001 certified and independently pentested. Cancellable monthly.
Want to try it yourself? View the HubSpot connector →
Prefer a different CRM? Salesforce connector → | Pipedrive connector →