Integrating Exact Online with a spend management platform: How and why

Disparate, disconnected financial systems create hidden costs that grow as your business scales.

As transaction volumes increase, finance teams deal with more suppliers, entities, cost centres, and currencies. When systems operate in isolation, that complexity turns into manual work. Time is lost reconciling data, fixing errors, and posting expenses into Exact Online by hand.

A native API integration between Payhawk and Exact Online removes that friction. You can:

• Eliminate repetitive manual uploads and reduce human error
• Sync expenses, receipts, and payments automatically in real time
• Gain full visibility of budgets and spending across every team or entity

The result is a finance function that stays accurate, agile, and scalable as you grow.

Why integrate Exact Online with a spend management platform?

Exact Online is a powerful accounting tool, but it’s not built to manage the full lifecycle of business spending. Expense approvals, card payments, invoice tracking, and reimbursements all live outside its core. When these processes are handled in separate systems, your finance team faces major problems, like duplicate data entry and reconciliation delays, fragmented insights into total company spend, and missed VAT reclaim opportunities.

By integrating a robust spend management solution, like Payhawk, with Exact Online, you connect your accounting and spend management processes in real time. This gives you three major benefits:

1. Data integrity: Every transaction and VAT code is mapped automatically.
2. Time savings: Up to 80% less manual posting work.
3. Decision confidence: Instant, reliable visibility across entities and cost centres.

Leon Steenbrink, CFO at Mercell Group, says:

The integration between Exact Online and Payhawk allows us to reduce manual work and avoid errors in accounting.

As your finance operations evolve, integration ensures your systems scale with you — maintaining speed, compliance, and control.

Disconnected systems drain time, accuracy, and focus

Manual expense processing doesn’t just slow finance teams down. It compounds as organisations scale.

At month-end, the pressure shows up fast. Financial controllers review dozens of expense claims, validate receipts, chase missing documentation across Slack or email, then export, re-code, and manually upload transactions into Exact Online. Each step adds friction. Each handoff increases the risk of errors. And every hour spent fixing data is an hour not spent on cash flow, forecasting, or strategic reporting.

As entities, cost centres, and currencies multiply, so do these inefficiencies. What might take an hour in a smaller business can easily stretch into days.

That’s the reality many teams face before automation. As Leon at Mercell Group puts it, “The integration between Exact Online and Payhawk allows us to reduce manual work and avoid errors in accounting.”

Selwyn Duijvestijn, Managing Director at DGB Group echoes the same pain:

Before switching to Payhawk, we had to manually upload and code each expense into Exact. It was slow and prone to error.

By connecting Payhawk and Exact Online through a native API, transactions sync automatically, from card payments to invoices. Redundant tasks disappear, accuracy improves, and finance teams regain confidence in their numbers, every day of the month.

Nine benefits of integrating Payhawk and Exact Online

Integrating Payhawk and Exact Online removes friction across your finance operations — from expense submission to month-end close.

Here’s what finance teams gain from a native API connection:

1. Automation & Accuracy

• Automatic transaction sync: Every card payment, invoice, and expense appears in Exact Online in real time — no manual uploads.
• Smart categorisation: Payhawk’s AI learns your coding preferences, applying the correct general ledger and VAT rates automatically.
• Automatic reconciliation: Routine matching of expenses and card transactions happens instantly, so your team only steps in for exceptions.

Christiaan de Page, CFO at Polysto, says:

We hardly have any manual work anymore. Everything is automated and synced to Exact.

2. Control & Compliance

• Custom approval workflows: Build tailored approval hierarchies that mirror your organisation. Ensure every spend is authorised before it hits your books.
• Real-time budget tracking: Monitor budget consumption as it happens, with alerts when thresholds are reached. Prevent overspending before it occurs.
• VAT reclaim accuracy: Capture and categorise VAT at the transaction level, increasing reclaim success and ensuring compliance across jurisdictions.

3. Scalability & Structure

• Multi-entity management: Consolidate data from all your entities seamlessly. Each entity’s chart of accounts, cost centres, and VAT codes stay perfectly aligned with Exact Online.
• Custom field mapping: Mirror your Exact Online structure within Payhawk — maintaining full control of financial reporting formats.
• Digital receipt capture (OCR): Employees capture receipts instantly via mobile; data is auto-read, attached, and synced — no chasing documents at month-end.

Why it matters

With integrated automation and control, finance teams typically:

Save up to 80% of manual processing time per month.
Close their books 2–3 days faster at month-end.
Improve audit readiness and VAT reclaim accuracy across all entities.

How to integrate Exact Online with a spend management platform

You need your expense management integration to be successful to minimise business disruption and hit the ground running, so here are four steps you can use to guide you through that process:

Step one: Audit your current processes

Mapping out your current processes can help you identify any bottlenecks or common touchpoints where errors can happen. This helps you understand what you need from your integration, i.e. data you want to track but currently can’t through Exact Online.

Step two: Configure your spend management integration and connect via native API

Connecting Payhawk to Exact Online is fast and non-disruptive - setup typically takes under an hour. Follow our guided checklist to sync your chart of accounts, VAT rates, and cost centres automatically. After making sure you have admin rights to both Payhawk and Exact Online, you can go ahead and sync your chart of accounts, VAT rates, cost centres, cost units, projects, and departments.

A native API between Payhawk and Exact Online means you get out-of-the-box functionality between the two platforms. This kind of integration is crucial if you’re striving for financial accuracy and efficiency. Connect the two platforms together through the Payhawk portal, and watch your data seamlessly and automatically exchange, from syncing expenses and VAT rates, to expenses and payments.

Hans Unger, Business Manager at Pathé, says:

The Payhawk and Exact API allow us to automate reconciliation and eliminate delays in processing.

Step three: Testing and validating transactions

To ensure minimal manual intervention, there are a few things you might want to do, including testing expenses and payment flows and validating reconciliation. You can test this by using our OCR to capture receipt or invoice data, submitting it for approval, etc. Then, to validate your transactions, you could check that payments are exporting automatically to Exact Online and all information is correct and matches your bank statements.

Best practices for managing integrated systems

The biggest risk with integrated systems isn’t the technology. It’s assuming people will change their behaviour automatically.

Even the best integration can fall short if teams don’t know how to use it confidently. That’s why successful finance teams treat enablement as part of the rollout, not an afterthought.

Train your team

Start with focused, role-specific training. Employees need to understand how to submit expenses correctly in the new app and what “good” looks like. Approvers should know exactly how approvals flow, what notifications to expect, and where to act quickly. Finance teams need clarity on how to handle exceptions, such as flagged transactions or missing information, without reverting to manual workarounds.

When everyone understands their part in the system, integration delivers its full value: fewer delays, fewer errors, and far less chasing at month-end.

Use the support on hand

Make good use of the support team, particularly for that first accounting cycle. Payhawk offers teams live training sessions to help them understand the new software. And with a dedicated account manager on hand, you can ask all the questions you want! Preparation is key.

Review mappings quarterly

Regular review cycles for mapping and categorisation rules are essential because business needs change, many projects have run their course, you add new cost centres, you might start using a new ERP system, whatever the changes, you need the way your configuration integrates to reflect these changes to ensure data consistency and quality.

Use error logs to troubleshoot

Error logs give you visibility over your data flows. This can prevent reporting or reconciliation discrepancies. By giving you the root cause of the problem, you can troubleshoot more quickly for user-level and integration-level issues. Our support team can also access your error logs, so they’re in a more informed position to help you resolve problems, too.

Integrating is essential for modern businesses

Disconnected financial systems slow growth, waste time, and hide critical data. By integrating Exact Online with Payhawk, you can automate reconciliation, gain real-time financial insight, and free your team to focus on strategic initiatives.

Learn more about our native API integration with Exact Online or book a personalised product demo.