Reporting on Exact Online with Power BI

Written By Sander Allert

What is Exact Online?

Exact Online is a cloud-based business software platform designed to provide integrated solutions for accounting, financial management, and business operations. Widely adopted in Belgium, the Netherlands and other parts of Europe, it caters primarily to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to streamline their administrative and operational workflows.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence and data visualization platform by Microsoft that enables users to connect to various data sources, transform data, and create interactive dashboards and reports. It's widely used by organizations to gain insights into their operations, monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), and make data-driven decisions.

Added Value of importing Exact Online into Power BI

This Power BI app integrates these two powerful tools—Exact Online and Power BI. It extracts data from Exact Online, such as financial records, invoices, customer details, and operational metrics, and feeds this data into Power BI. This integration allows you to create dynamic, customizable reports that provide clear insights into your business's financial health and operational performance, enabling better decision-making and strategic management.

By leveraging Exact Online for data collection and Power BI for analysis, the app empowers users to:

  • Monitor financial and operational trends in real-time.

  • Visualize business performance, including revenue, expenses, and customer data.

  • Optimize resource allocation, cash flow management, and billing processes.

Use Cases

Please see below some of the reports and use cases that have been tackled with Exact Online as a source.

Authenticating to Exact Online from Power BI

Follow these steps to authenticate the app to your Exact Online Account:

1) Login to Exact Online and register an App using API Key on this URL: https://apps.exactonline.com/nl/nl-NL/V2/Manage

2) Press on the button ‘Register an app’

3) Give the app a name, for example: ‘Power BI Access’. Also fill-in the ‘Redirect URI’ to a thrusted website, in our example we used https://google.com. After authentication within Exact Online, you’ll be redirected to this ‘Redirect URI’ where part of your token will be in the URL.

4) After accepting the terms and conditions, you’ll be granted the following information:

  • Client ID: This is the technical id of your API. Write it down to use in our next steps. An example is e58ea28f-4582-410c-b46b-c72c26e296d5.

  • You’re also granted a Client secret and webhook secret. In the provided Power BI App, this is not used.

5) Build-up your authentication URL. This URL consists of several parts that need to be glued together: a, authentication URL, the obtained client id, the inputted redirect URI and the method of authentication.

  • A complete URL would look like this: https://start.exactonline.nl/api/oauth2/auth?client_id=e58ea28f-4582-410c-b46b-c72c26e296d5&redirect_uri=https://google.com&response_type=token

  • This URL is needed everytime you’ll want to refresh this information. It is advised to keep it somewhere close such as in your browser bookmarks bar (= save this URL as you’ll need it). That way, you easily can go back to this site.

6) Now that you’ve built-up the URL, navigate to it. You’ll be asked to sign-in to Exact with your personal information. It will also prompt you if you allow the app to connect to your data. Upon accepting, you’ll be redirected to your redirect URI (in our case https://google.com) but after the URL there will be a long authentication code. This URL will consist of three types of information. The token type, the access token and the expiry time (600 seconds = 10 minutes) . An example is: https://www.google.com/#token_type=bearer&access_token=stampNL…………pMkzNNMPvEE&expires_in=600

7) Now copy the whole URL and fill-it in the parameters of the Power BI App template. Your template app will now use the access token you’ve created to import data from Exact Online.

Wait, I need more information!

we encourage you to contact us if you're in need of some more advanced functionalities such as:

  • Scheduling a timely refresh: We can provide you with a solution that allows a periodic refresh for Exact Online.

  • Reporting on admin functionalities: Billable rates, project estimations, expenses, invoices, sales, ...

  • Working with multiple tenants: If you've got more than one company, you're probably working with multiple tenants. We have a solution for that!

  • Combining Exact Online with other sources: Exact Online might not be your single source of truth. Let us help you in bringing in more sources!

  • Performance Improvements / Incremental Refreshes / Technical Problems: If you're in need for a faster solution, want to implement incremental refresh or other technical improvements, we can assist you with that!


You can simply contact us by sending an email to with your inquiry: info@plainsight.pro

Sander Allert
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