Margin per channel, returns and PSP costs in view with AI

A web shop of your own, sales through Bol and since this year an international marketplace too. Orders keep coming in and the connectors book everything neatly into Exact Online. Still, one question lingers every month: which channel actually earns money, and where does profit leak away to returns and transaction costs?

These days you can answer that question without any export work. Connect your AI assistant to your administration and ask in plain English for your margin per channel, your returns trend or your payment costs per month. Why is that possible now while your dashboards fall short? Here is how it works.

Why you never see your margin per channel on a single screen

The data has been there all along. Through the Shopify connector and the Bol connector, every order lands automatically in Exact Online, complete with customer, items and stock. So your bookkeeping is in fact omnichannel, even if your reports are not.

That is where the friction sits. The standard reports show totals: revenue per month, a profit and loss account, a balance sheet. Fine for the accountant, but your questions are different. What do I keep on a marketplace order? Which items come back most often? And how much do I actually pay my payment provider over a year?

Anyone who wants to know exports to Excel, filters by journal and pastes cost prices alongside. You do that thoroughly once. After that, the pressures of the day take over.

Ask the margin question in plain English

With Exact AI Connect you connect your own AI assistant, Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini or Perplexity, directly to Exact Online. For the big questions the connector uses an analysis function that can handle your entire administration:

• revenue and margin per item, including top 10s
• costs per supplier and per cost account
• trends per month or quarter, also across several years

And so channel questions too. If every connector books its orders recognisably, for example in its own journal or on its own sales relation, then the AI groups your revenue per channel and sets the costs alongside. That way you see in a single answer that your own shop runs a different margin than the marketplace, and whether that difference is growing or shrinking.

The limit is honest: the AI analyses what is booked in Exact Online. It does not look directly into your web shop or your marketplace account, and whatever is not in your administration does not exist for the analysis. In practice that tends to work as an advantage: you force yourself to book all channels neatly, and after that one question calculates everything.

Track down the quiet profit leaks: PSP costs and returns

PSP costs are the transaction fees your payment provider withholds per order, think of the charge per iDEAL payment or credit card transaction. Per order it amounts to little. Added up it is a serious cost item that rarely appears on a dashboard. If you book those costs to a separate ledger account, the AI totals them per month and sets them next to your revenue in that same month. If your payment costs rise faster than your revenue, you now do see it.

Returns work the same way. They land in your administration as credit notes, and you can analyse them: number and amount per month, the trend across the year, and which items get credited most often. An item that sells well but keeps coming back cuts into your margin harder than you think.

That leaves the reconciliation: matching the payments you receive to the right outstanding items. This can also be done through the AI connector. You ask which invoices match a payment and reconcile them once you have confirmed. If you process large volumes of webshop sales, you can fully automate this with the Reconciliation module, which supports all major payment providers.

Stay in control: confirmation, rights and security

An AI with access to your bookkeeping calls for clear agreements, and these are built into the connector. Analyses are read actions. If the AI wants to create or change something, such as during reconciliation, there is always a confirmation step first: you see what is about to happen and approve it. You can also restrict write rights per role or set the connector to read-only entirely, with a daily limit as an extra brake.

Exact AI Connect is ISO 27001 certified and independently pentested, and we are an official Exact Online partner. You can try it free for 30 days with all features and up to 3 administrations, after which the subscription can be cancelled monthly.

Example prompts for your webshop administration

Copy these questions into your connected AI assistant and adapt them to your own setup:

Give me the revenue per journal for this quarter, so I can compare my sales channels side by side.

What are the 10 items with the highest revenue this year, and what is the margin per item?

Add up the costs on the general ledger account for payment provider fees per month and place them next to the revenue of the same month.

How many credit notes did we book this year per month, and what is the total amount? Show the trend.

Which suppliers cost me more this year than last year? Sort by the difference.

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