Exact Online and WooCommerce: plugin or custom integration?

If you sell through WooCommerce and keep your books in Exact Online, someone in your company probably copies orders from one to the other. There are two ways to stop doing that: install an existing connector, or have a custom integration built. Both are valid. The right choice depends on your volumes, your processes and how much your data deviates from the standard.

What an integration actually has to do

Before comparing options, write down what needs to move, in which direction, and how often. For most shops the list looks like this:

• Orders → Exact: as sales orders, sales invoices or sales entries, depending on how your accountant works.
• Customers → Exact: create or match the relation (debtor), including VAT numbers for B2B customers.
• Payments → Exact: mark invoices as paid, ideally matched to the payment provider's settlements.
• Products and prices: usually Exact → WooCommerce, if Exact is where articles are maintained.
• Stock: Exact → WooCommerce, if you use Exact for inventory (Exact Online Trade or Manufacturing).
• Refunds and cancellations: credit notes, which are the part most often forgotten.

Then add the details that make integrations hard: VAT rates per country (including OSS for EU consumer sales), shipping costs as separate lines, discounts, gift cards, bundles, and orders that are edited after they were placed.

When a plugin is enough

Several connectors exist, both as WordPress plugins and in the Exact App Center. They are a good choice when:

• your order flow is standard: one VAT setup, simple products, payment before shipping
• a sync delay is acceptable (many connectors run on a schedule rather than instantly)
• you are comfortable mapping your process to the connector's options instead of the other way round
• volume is modest, so occasional manual correction is cheap

Try them first. A monthly connector fee is almost always cheaper than custom development, and if it covers 95% of your orders, the remaining 5% may be cheaper to handle by hand than to automate.

When custom pays for itself

A custom integration starts to make sense when one or more of these are true:

• Your process is not standard. Multiple Exact administrations, B2B price agreements, consignment, drop shipping, or orders that must be split by warehouse.
• Errors are expensive. Wrong VAT, duplicate invoices or missed credit notes create accounting work that costs more than the integration.
• You need it fast. Stock that must be correct within minutes, or invoices that must exist before the parcel ships.
• You need visibility. You want to see what was synced, what failed and why, instead of discovering gaps at month end.
• Several systems are involved. Shop, Exact, a warehouse (WMS), a marketplace like Bol.com and a payment provider: at that point you are designing data flows, not installing a plugin. See syncing stock across channels without overselling.

What a good custom integration looks like

Whether we build it or someone else does, insist on these properties:

1. Idempotent processing. Every order is processed exactly once, even if a webhook arrives twice or a job is retried. In practice: store the WooCommerce order ID with the Exact document it created, and check before creating.
2. Respect for API limits. Exact Online's REST API enforces per-minute and daily call limits per administration. A sync that loads all orders every few minutes will hit them. Process changes incrementally and queue work.
3. Token handling. Exact uses OAuth 2.0 with short-lived access tokens and refresh tokens. Token refresh must be robust, or the integration silently stops one weekend.
4. Logging and alerts. Each sync step is logged with the order number, and failures alert a person. A failed sync that nobody notices is worse than no integration.
5. A reconciliation job. Webhooks get lost. A daily job that compares both sides and repairs differences keeps the systems honest.
6. Documented mapping. Which WooCommerce field becomes which Exact field, which VAT code maps to which tax rate, and what happens with edge cases. Your accountant should be able to read it.

How to decide

Start with a list of your order types and the volume of each. Try the leading connector on a test administration with your real edge cases: an EU B2B order with a VAT number, a refund, an order with a discount and a gift card. If it handles them correctly, use it. If you find yourself correcting a meaningful share of orders by hand, a custom integration is likely worth a quote.

Our integrations and automation service starts with exactly that list, and we will tell you if an existing connector does the job. See also our pages on Exact Online and Moneybird integrations.