Most Dutch SME automation stalls at the same wall. The AI can read the invoice, draft the answer or spot the anomaly, and then has nowhere to put it, because the numbers live in Exact, AFAS or e-Boekhouden and nothing connects the two. This page is about building that connection, what it can do, what it cannot, and what it costs.
Last updated: 11 June 2026
AI becomes useful for a Dutch SME the moment it can read from and write to the systems you already run. Exact Online, AFAS and e-Boekhouden all expose APIs, so a connection is a normal integration project rather than research. The work is in scoping: which processes justify a write-back, which stay read-only, and who owns the connection afterwards. We build these at fixed prices, starting with a €2,500 audit.
Connected AI is worth doing where a process is repetitive, rule-bound and currently costs someone hours of retyping. In Dutch SMEs that is nearly always one of these:
There are three honest ways to get AI and your administration talking, and they suit different budgets. The audit's job is to pick the least expensive one that actually solves your case, which is often not the one we build.
| Route | Fits when | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Built-in vendor AI | The feature your package already ships covers the process, for example invoice recognition inside your own accounting software | Least expensive and safest. Limited to what the vendor built, and you cannot change its logic |
| No-code connector (n8n, Make) | A straightforward flow between two or three systems, modest volume, tolerant of manual checks | Fast and inexpensive to start. Gets fragile as branching, error handling and volume grow |
| Custom integration | The logic is yours, volume is real, and errors have consequences in the ledger | Highest up-front cost, but it is the only route where you control validation, logging and roll-back |
Write-back is a different risk class from reading. Pulling figures out of Exact or AFAS to summarise them is low-stakes. Booking something into the ledger is not, because a wrong entry propagates into VAT returns and annual accounts. Our default is read-only first, with a human approval step before anything is written, and full write-back only for processes that have proven themselves.
API limits are a design constraint, not a detail. These platforms document call limits per administration and per app, and a naive integration that polls everything constantly will hit them. That is a solved problem, through incremental syncs and queues, but it has to be designed in from the start rather than discovered in production.
Someone has to own it after go-live. Accounting platforms change their APIs, authorisations expire, a token gets revoked when someone leaves. An integration nobody maintains fails silently, which is worse than failing loudly. That is what managed AI at €500 per month covers. For the technical detail on each platform's integration patterns, our explainer on how AI connects to Exact Online, AFAS and e-Boekhouden goes deeper.
We do not start with a platform choice. We start with which process, if automated, pays back inside a year. The €2,500 AI audit maps your administration, your volumes and your actual bottleneck, and tells you which of the three routes above fits, including the answer 'your package already does this, do not build anything'.
If a build is justified, the proof of concept is €20,000: one working connection on your own data, with acceptance criteria agreed before we start. Production, hardened and integrated, is from €50,000, and managed AI is €500 per month afterwards. Development like this can sometimes qualify for WBSO, which funds your own R&D wage costs rather than our invoices. We do that check free of charge, and we say so plainly when the answer is no. See AI subsidies for SMEs for the full picture.
We map your systems, your volumes and the one process worth connecting first. Start with the €2,500 AI audit.
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