Consolidating with Exact Online: from Excel downloads to a real-time close (2026)

Consolidating with Exact Online: from Excel downloads to a real-time close

Exact Online is the most widely used SME accounting package in the Netherlands, but it does not consolidate across multiple administrations. How to solve that without replacing Exact Online.

Why Exact Online does not consolidate multi-entity groups on its own

Exact Online is built as a single-entity accounting package. Every administration stands alone: its own chart of accounts, its own opening balance, its own audit trail. That works fine for one legal entity, but as soon as you run a group of two or more entities — a holding with subsidiaries, a buy-and-build with acquired companies, an operating structure across countries — you hit three hard limits when consolidating with Exact Online.

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First limit: Exact Online produces no consolidated balance sheet or profit and loss statement. Each administration gives you a trial balance; cross-administration consolidation is not a standard feature. Second limit: intercompany transactions are not detected and eliminated automatically. Book a management fee between holding and subsidiary and it sits in two administrations — as revenue at the holding and as a cost at the subsidiary — and at group consolidation both must be netted out. Exact Online does not do that for you. Third limit: charts of accounts almost always drift apart between entities. A 4000 range at one entity is a 7000 range at another. Without a mapping layer between the entity chart and the group chart of accounts, you get no comparable figures.

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The practical consequence: SME groups on Exact Online consolidate in Excel every month — exporting trial balances, mapping, netting out IC, converting currency, adding up the total. And as soon as a booking turns out missing or wrong, the entire reporting cycle starts over: download the period balance again and work it back into the report. Time investment: 3-5 working days per close cycle for a group with three entities. And substantiating the group figures for the auditor or due diligence is hard to do.

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A consolidation tool on top of Exact Online solves this without replacing Exact Online. Finstack connects every Exact Online administration directly via API, maps charts of accounts to the group chart once, detects IC automatically on account, counter-entity and amount, and runs the eliminations in a separate consolidation layer. Exact Online remains your transactional accounting; Finstack delivers the consolidated reporting. For the broader choice between Excel, a consolidation tool or a heavier ERP, see the main article on consolidation solutions per ERP.

What Exact Online can and cannot do for multi-entity consolidation

For anyone considering consolidating with Exact Online, it helps to be precise about what the package can and cannot handle. Exact Online is excellent at single-entity accounting: a complete general ledger, an audit trail per booking, reports per administration, VAT returns, EU sales listings, invoicing and bank feeds. On that layer Exact Online is a solid choice for SMEs and it is widely used — by its own account, Exact is the market leader in accounting software for Dutch SMEs.

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What Exact Online does not do for multi-entity:

• Consolidated reporting and dashboards. You can pull a profit and loss statement or balance sheet per administration, but no consolidated view across administrations. Serious dashboards and insight into data fields such as cost centers across administrations are missing too.
• Automatic intercompany elimination. An IC receivable and its matching IC payable sit in two separate Exact Online administrations; Exact Online does not tie them together and books no eliminations at group level.
• Intercompany reconciliation. No way to reconcile IC bookings between administrations — do receivables and payables, revenue and costs tie out? — and no reconciliation of the eliminations as a control step after consolidation either.
• Consolidated working capital insights. No group-wide view of receivables, payables and inventory positions: no insight per relation, no consolidated ageing analysis and no consolidated cash flow overview — and thus no steering on the group’s working capital as a whole.
• Mapping to a group chart of accounts. Every administration has its own chart of accounts. A central mapping layer to a group chart is not part of Exact Online.

What Exact Online does make available via its API (and what a consolidation tool uses): per administration, the Exact Online REST API delivers general ledger transactions, trial balances, the chart of accounts, outstanding items, receivables and payables, and currency data. Read-only, straight from the API, at transaction level. That is exactly what a consolidation tool needs.

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Finstack fills in the consolidation layer for SME groups on Exact Online: direct API connection, mapping, IC detection, eliminations, adjustment entries and group reporting in one tool. The Exact Online administrations remain the system of record for your entity accounting — Finstack never writes back to Exact Online.

How the Finstack connection to Exact Online works

The Finstack connection to Exact Online is a direct API connection on the official Exact Online API: linked to all your Exact Online administrations in a few clicks, including every international variant of Exact Online. The connection is read-only: Finstack reads the figures, cannot write anything, and bookings remain fully in the user’s hands in Exact Online itself.

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The connection works at transaction level. That means Finstack pulls in not just period balances but the underlying general ledger transactions: debit line, credit line, date, journal, contra account, description and currency. That is essential for three reasons: clean intercompany elimination (without transaction lines you cannot match IC pairs), click-through (from consolidated figure to the source transaction in Exact Online), and explainability (the external auditor wants to see where a consolidated item comes from).

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Sync rhythm: Finstack refreshes the Exact Online connection automatically every day. On top of that, the user can start a manual refresh at any moment via a button in the Finstack interface — useful right before the close, or after booking a correction in Exact Online that needs to flow into the consolidation immediately. The sync does not affect Exact Online’s performance: all queries run as read-only API calls and are as light for Exact Online as a report export.

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What the connection concretely supports: multiple Exact Online administrations at the same time, a new group entity is connected on the spot, every Exact Online subscription type, and effortless mixing with other ERPs in the same group (a Dutch holding on Exact Online and a German subsidiary on MS Dynamics 365 BC simply run in one consolidated report in Finstack).

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Setup time for the connection itself is 5 minutes per administration: in Finstack you select Exact Online as a source, log in at Exact and confirm access — done. The first sync pulls in the history (opening balance and current-year transactions); after that, Finstack automatically synchronises only new and changed bookings, every day.

Intercompany detection in Exact Online: account, counter-entity and amount

Intercompany elimination is the hardest puzzle when consolidating with Exact Online: which transaction on which side of the group nets out against which other one? A group with five entities already has ten possible IC pairs; with ten entities, 45. Sorting that out by hand every month does not scale.

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Many SME groups on Exact Online use two conventions to make IC transactions recognisable in the accounts:

1. Separate ledger accounts per IC relation. The most robust approach: a 1900 range (or similar) in which every IC counter-entity gets its own account number. “1910 — IC receivable Subsidiary BV", and so on. This prevents IC transactions from disappearing among the regular receivables and payables.
2. Contra-account convention with IC coding. One collective IC account, with a fixed code per relation in the journal or the description. Works too, but requires discipline from whoever does the bookkeeping.

Finstack works with both conventions but does not require them: the engine recognises IC relations on its own, even on your existing ledger setup. It looks at three attributes at once: account number (which IC account), counter-entity (which entity on the other side), and amount match (finding the mirror booking in the other administration). A match on all three gives high confidence; a match on two is flagged for manual review.

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Reconciliation works on two sides in Finstack. You reconcile the IC bookings themselves — which IC pairs tie out, which ones show a difference (and how large), which ones are booked on one side only — and after the consolidation you reconcile the eliminations as a control step. That is exactly what you build intercompany schedules for in Excel — now automatic and clickable through to the source.

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What goes wrong without a good tool: matching IC on account name only (descriptions vary), on amount only (unrelated bookings can share the same amount), or skipping reconciliation altogether (elimination differences then linger on the balance sheet as an unexplained residual). Finstack signals the differences — on the IC bookings and on the eliminations themselves — so you resolve them at the source. Eliminations are booked strictly in the consolidation layer, never in Exact Online itself: entity balance sheets stay clean.

Setup: from Exact Online connection to consolidated figures in one day

Setting up consolidation on Exact Online with Finstack takes three simple steps, fully self-service. Live in 5 minutes, fully set up within a day — typically 4-6 hours of effective work, depending on the number of entities and the complexity of the chart of accounts.

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Step 1 — Connect the Exact Online administrations. In Finstack you select Exact Online as a source, log in and grant Finstack read access — the connection is live. Repeat this for every administration in the group. Finstack immediately pulls in the opening balance and the current-year transactions.

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Step 2 — Set up the reporting structure and mapping. You decide which entities belong to the group and how they relate — holding, subsidiaries, subgroups — and link the charts of accounts of the administrations to the group chart of accounts. Deliberately kept simple: per account you pick the group account, with no complicated rules and no consultants. One-off work; after that it carries through every close.

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Step 3 — Automate the intercompany eliminations. Finstack shows the IC relations it recognises in the Exact Online administrations; per IC relation you confirm once which account pairs net out against each other. From that moment the eliminations run automatically in every consolidation, with reconciliation as the control step on differences.

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From then on the consolidated group profit and loss statement and group balance sheet are ready in real time: eliminations run automatically, Finstack signals IC differences through reconciliation, and every figure clicks through to the source transaction in Exact Online. If another entity joins the group later, you simply connect it and it flows into the consolidated reporting straight away. No weeks-long implementation: Finstack provides onboarding support and step-by-step documentation. From EUR 39 per month for the first entity.

Reporting and dashboards on top of Exact Online

Consolidating with Exact Online is not a goal in itself: the consolidated figures need to find their way to the board, the bank and investors. That is exactly where Exact Online stops — group-level reporting, serious dashboards and consolidated analysis are not part of the package. Finstack delivers that reporting layer on top of the consolidation.

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Real-time dashboards at group level. As soon as the sync has run, the consolidated figures are in the Finstack dashboard: group profit and loss, group balance sheet and KPIs, clickable through to the source transaction in Exact Online. Because the connection works at transaction level, you can also analyse data fields that Exact Online does not unlock across administrations: relations, cost centers and journals at group level, with filters per entity or subgroup. You can also share dashboards and reports with stakeholders such as management, investors and the accountant, by giving them access to Finstack, with access rights set per user.

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Consolidated ageing analysis and cash flow. Receivables and payables positions across the whole group in one ageing analysis, and a consolidated cash flow overview that shows where the group’s cash flows originate — neither can be built from separate Exact Online administrations without manual work.

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Export to Excel and Google Sheets. For anyone who builds analyses and board reports in their own models: Finstack has 2-way integration with both Excel and Google Sheets. Consolidated figures refresh inside your own workbook, with no copy-paste — and parallel reports (management, statutory, per business unit) come from the same transaction layer.

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For SME CFOs this means the monthly reporting is no longer an Excel project: the figures are ready in real time, the underlying detail sits one click away, and the same source feeds dashboard, spreadsheet and statutory accounts. Consolidating with Exact Online becomes reporting with Exact Online — without replacing the package, and without a consultancy track or implementation fees.

What a good consolidation tool for Exact Online should do — checklist

A consolidation tool on Exact Online should support five capabilities as standard. This is the checklist for the selection phase.

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1. Direct API connection at transaction level. Not just trial-balance level, but general ledger transactions with date, journal and contra account. Without transaction level there is no clean IC elimination and no drill-down to the source. Finstack connects to Exact Online at transaction level.

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2. Daily sync plus manual refresh. A tool that only synchronises weekly or monthly lags behind reality. Automatic daily sync is the floor; on-demand refresh on top lets you correct right before the close. Finstack does both as standard.

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3. Automated intercompany detection on account, counter-entity and amount. Not on account name alone (too unreliable) or amount alone (false matches). Three attributes combined give the most reliable matching. Reconciliation should be built in as a control step on the elimination. Finstack signals differences so you resolve them at the source.

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4. Exports to stakeholders: dashboard, Excel and Google Sheets. Consolidated figures need to reach the board, the bank and investors. A good tool offers its own dashboard plus direct export to Excel and Google Sheets, so existing reporting models keep working. Finstack has both.

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5. Mixing with other ERPs in the same group. Many SME groups do not run entirely on Exact Online: a foreign subsidiary runs on MS Dynamics 365 BC, an operating branch on AFAS. Finstack connects Exact Online directly and all other major ERPs — see the main article on consolidation solutions per ERP — plus a CSV fallback for the rest.

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From EUR 39/month, live in 5 minutes, fully set up within a day on Exact Online.

The 3 most common mistakes when consolidating with Exact Online

Three patterns we see over and over at SME groups on Exact Online. Each costs measurable time or money; each is preventable with the right setup.

Sources and provenance

• Finstack — Integrations with Exact Online and other ERPs: finstack.io/solutions/integrations
• Finstack Help Center — Sources & connections (sync frequency, security): help.finstack.io
• Finstack — Pricing (from EUR 39/month): finstack.io/pricing
• Exact — Exact Online REST API documentation: developers.exactonline.com
• Exact — market position and company profile: exact.com

Last reviewed: 17 July 2026 · Next review: October 2026