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Exact AI Connect or the Exact AI Assistant: which one suits you?
Exact Online has its own AI assistant, and with AI Connect you connect your own AI to your administration. That way you decide what suits your way of working.
When did you last pull a report together while you really only had one question? Something like: which customers are shrinking this year, or how much has been outstanding for more than 60 days. For exactly those moments there are now two AI routes around Exact Online: the Exact AI Assistant that sits inside the package itself, and Exact AI Connect, which lets you connect your own AI assistant to your administration.
Full transparency up front: AI Connect is our own product. That is precisely why we compare fairly and mark figures from Exact as their own claims. Because the Assistant is simply good at quite a number of tasks, and sometimes that built-in help is all you need.
Where the Exact AI Assistant is strong
Exact launched its AI Assistant at the end of 2024 and rolled it out to Exact Online users in the Netherlands and Belgium. In daily use you notice its strength mainly in guiding you through the package and in questions about how something works. According to Exact the assistant resolves 98% of how-to questions directly and handles around 500 questions a day. It makes sense that a built-in assistant wins there: it knows the software from the inside.
In addition, Exact deploys a series of AI agents that automate processes. The Bank Agent matches payments to invoices; according to Exact it monitors over 100 million transactions a month. The Purchase Agent recognises purchase invoices with, again according to Exact, an accuracy of 98%. And the Debtor Agent predicts payment dates and chooses a suitable communication profile per debtor; the payment term (DSO) is said to drop by up to 20% as a result, which is also Exact's own figure. On Exact's pricing page the Bank, Purchase and Support Agent appear in all editions; the Debtor Agent from the Plus edition onwards.
We have not come across a separate surcharge for the Assistant anywhere; according to Exact it is available to all users. Fairly summarised, the demonstrable strength therefore lies in built-in process automation and software support. Free data analysis is another story: the analysis agents (Financial and Excel) are still listed as beta by Exact itself.
What Exact AI Connect adds to that
AI Connect takes it from the other side. Instead of an assistant inside Exact Online, you connect your administration to the AI assistant you already use anyway: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or Perplexity. The connector works via MCP; you can read how that open standard connects AI assistants with software in our article about MCP.
The biggest difference lies in freedom. You ask any question that comes to mind, in plain English: revenue per customer per month, a top 10 of cost items, customers shrinking by more than 20 percent. No fixed reports or pre-conceived alerts; you keep asking until you have the answer. And because the conversation takes place in your own AI app, you work outside the Exact environment. Your figures sit alongside everything else you do there, from writing a memo to calculating an investment.
Writing is also possible: creating relations, drafting concept invoices, reconciling payments. Always with an explicit confirmation step, the AI never makes a change unprompted. If you want it tighter, you can limit writing rights per role or set the connector to read-only. AI Connect costs €29 (Essentials) or €79 (Analytics) per user per month; which subscription suits when we have worked out separately. You start with a free 30-day trial of all features, after which you can cancel monthly.
The differences at a glance
| Where it runs | AI choice | Free analysis | Write actions | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exact AI Assistant | Within Exact Online | Exact's own AI, no choice | Limited; analysis agents in beta | Fixed processes: bank, purchasing, debtors | Included according to Exact; Debtor Agent from Plus |
| Exact AI Connect | In your own AI app, also outside Exact | ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or Perplexity | Free questions and analyses in plain English | Creating and editing, always with a confirmation step | €29 or €79 per user per month, 30 days free |
For completeness: in its roadmap Exact announces its own MCP server, which would let external AI agents work with Exact Online data. There is no date or quarter attached, so what it will become exactly and when cannot be said right now. The fact that Exact embraces this route itself we mainly see as confirmation that connecting your own AI to your bookkeeping is becoming the normal way of working.
How to choose, and why you often don't have to
Do you use Exact Online mainly operationally and are you looking for help with buttons, settings and automatic bank and purchase processing? Then the Assistant will probably get you a long way. It is already built in and the agents take recurring work off your hands.
Do you want to be able to ask and analyse freely, or do you already work in ChatGPT or Claude every day? Then AI Connect adds the most. Think of the entrepreneur who reviews revenue and outstanding items every Monday morning, or the controller who wants to compare quarterly figures without first building exports.
Both work fine together, by the way. The Assistant automates within Exact Online, AI Connect answers your questions outside it. They do not get in each other's way technically.
Our view: let the Assistant do mainly what it is good at; we have not come across a separate surcharge for that. But as soon as you have questions that the fixed reports do not answer, that is the signal for AI Connect. The 30-day trial is there precisely to test that on your own administration.
Try these questions in your own AI assistant
Connect your administration and copy one of these prompts. The analysis questions work during the trial period and in the Analytics variant.
Compare my monthly revenue this year with last year.
Which customers have shrunk by more than 20 per cent this year?
Give the ageing analysis of my debtors.
Create a concept invoice for the monthly licence of [customer name].
With the latter, the AI first asks for your confirmation before anything in your administration changes. That is how it should be.
Want to try it yourself? Start for free with Exact AI Connect →
Frequently asked questions
According to Exact, the Assistant is available for all Exact Online users, and the sources we found do not mention a separate additional charge. However, the Exact pricing page does state that the Debtor Agent is only available from the Plus edition onwards. So do check your own edition.
We have not found any independent tests. The available figures, such as 98% of how-to questions solved directly, come from Exact itself. What you can deduce from this is that support, navigation and the banking and purchasing agents are the mature parts. The analysis features are still marked as beta by Exact.
Yes, that is exactly what Exact AI Connect does. It also works with Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity. If you are unsure which AI assistant to choose, read our comparison of ChatGPT and Claude.
Yes. The Assistant simply keeps working within Exact Online, while AI Connect runs outside it, in your own AI app. There is no overlap that gets in the way.
Yes, provided it is set up properly. Exact AI Connect is ISO 27001 certified and independently pen-tested. We only store financial data with the Analytics subscription, in a secure analysis environment within the EU that we delete as soon as you stop. We are an official Exact Online partner and you decide yourself what access the AI gets: read only, or also write with confirmation.
