Connecting Salesforce to Exact Online: options and points of attention

At the end of 2025, Salesforce launched Agentforce 360, a platform where autonomous AI agents qualify leads, route cases and follow up on opportunities without human intervention. The "Data 360" layer that Salesforce builds beneath it aggregates customer data in real time across all clouds. Those agents make decisions on their own and need up to date financial data to do so. Not tomorrow, but now. If your Salesforce Exact Online connector is outdated or manual, those agents miss crucial information: outstanding invoices, payment history, credit limits.

That makes the question of how to connect Salesforce and Exact Online more relevant than ever. In this article we compare four ways to build that connector, with the pros and cons of each approach.

What exactly do you synchronise?

Before you choose a connector solution, it helps to know which data usually travels back and forth between Salesforce and Exact Online.

From Salesforce to Exact Online:

• Accounts and Contacts become relations and contact persons in Exact Online
• Opportunities become sales orders or invoices
• Products and PricebookEntries become items and price lists

From Exact Online to Salesforce:

• Invoice status: has the invoice been sent, paid or is it overdue?
• Payment information: when was payment made and how much?
• Outstanding items: what is still open per customer?

That return flow is crucial. A sales rep calling a customer who has three unpaid invoices wants to know that before the conversation starts. And Agentforce agents that make autonomous decisions about upsell opportunities? They need that data in real time.

Option 1: Orbis Software connector

Orbis Software offers a ready-made connector between Salesforce and Exact Online. It is one of the better known solutions on the Dutch market.

Pros:

• Proven product with specific Exact Online knowledge
• Standard field mappings for the most common objects
• Support from a Dutch company

Cons:

• Limited flexibility for deviating processes
• Licence costs that rise as you add more users
• Adjustments beyond the standard require custom work
• Updates depend on the Orbis release cycle

For companies with a fairly standard sales to invoicing process, the Orbis connector can be a solid choice. If you work with complex price structures, multi-currency or customised Salesforce objects, you will run into limits sooner.

Option 2: Zapier or Make (no-code)

Platforms such as Zapier and Make let you build connectors between hundreds of applications without code, including Salesforce and Exact Online.

Pros:

• Quick to set up for simple flows
• No developer needed
• Low entry costs

Cons:

• The Exact Online integration is limited (few available actions)
• No support for complex logic such as multi-currency or stock mutations
• At high volume the costs become unpredictable (paying per task)
• Error handling is rudimentary: if a sync fails, you sometimes only notice days later
• No bi-directional sync without double Zaps/scenarios

Zapier or Make works fine if you want to push a handful of new customers per week from Salesforce to Exact Online. But as soon as you want to synchronise invoice statuses back or work with more than a hundred transactions a day, you quickly reach the limits.

Option 3: Custom API integration

You can also have a fully custom integration built by a development team. Direct connectors through the Salesforce REST API and the Exact Online API.

Pros:

• Maximum flexibility, anything is possible
• Precisely tailored to your processes
• Full control over data flow and error handling

Cons:

• High initial costs (tens of thousands of euros is not unusual)
• Lead time of months
• Maintenance is entirely your responsibility
• Every API change from Salesforce or Exact Online can break the connector
• The knowledge sits with the developer, what if they leave?

Custom integrations make sense for enterprise organisations with unique processes that fit nowhere else. For most companies it is overkill and a long term risk.

Option 4: iWebDevelopment custom connector

iWebDevelopment offers a custom connector between Salesforce and Exact Online that sits between a standard connector and a fully custom solution.

Pros:

• Configurable field mappings, no code needed for standard adjustments
• Support for multi-currency (CurrencyIsoCode to AmountFC/AmountDC)
• Bi-directional sync including invoice status and payments
• ISO 27001 certified, independently pen-tested
• Cancellable monthly, no contract obligations
• Official Exact Online partner

Cons:

• Less well known than Orbis on the Salesforce market
• For very complex Salesforce customisations, additional consultation may be needed

The comparison at a glance

Points of attention for every Salesforce-Exact connector

Whichever option you choose, there are a few technical points to think through in advance.

Field mapping is less simple than it seems: Salesforce stores an address as BillingStreet, BillingCity, BillingPostalCode and BillingCountry, four separate fields. Exact Online uses a separate Addresses object with its own structure. Translating that does not always go one to one. The same applies to contact persons: Salesforce links Contacts to Accounts, Exact Online links contact persons to relations. The hierarchy looks the same, but the ID structure differs.

Multi-currency deserves extra attention: Salesforce has a CurrencyIsoCode field on almost every object. Exact Online works with AmountFC (invoice amount in foreign currency) and AmountDC (amount in your administration currency). If you invoice in multiple currencies, your connector has to make that translation flawless, including exchange rates.

Sandbox versus production: Salesforce has an extensive sandbox system. Always test your connector first in a Salesforce sandbox with an Exact Online test administration. A field mapping error that creates a thousand invoices incorrectly is not something you want to discover in production.

Agentforce needs real-time data: If you deploy Agentforce agents that make autonomous decisions based on customer data, a nightly batch sync is not enough. Those agents expect current payment status and outstanding items. Choose a connector that supports near real-time synchronisation, or at least several times a day.

The right choice depends on your situation

There is no universal "best" connector. A company with ten Salesforce users and a standard sales process has different needs than an enterprise with five Salesforce clouds, multi-currency and Agentforce agents.

What is universal: the connector between your CRM and accounting is becoming more important, not less. AI agents, whether they come from Salesforce, HubSpot or another party, need reliable, current financial data. The better you set up that data flow now, the more you will benefit from it later.

Want to dive deeper into what a custom connector looks like in practice? Then read how a Salesforce-Exact custom connector works.

Want to try it yourself? View the Salesforce connector →

Prefer a different CRM? HubSpot connector → | Pipedrive connector →