How to connect to Exact Online (UK)

This connector is pinned to Exact Online's UK instance (https://start.exactonline.co.uk). Connecting takes one step: you sign in with your own Exact Online UK login and approve the integration. There are no credentials to copy, no client keys to paste, and no region to pick.

Prerequisites

An active Exact Online subscription on the UK instance. If you normally sign in at start.exactonline.co.uk, you are on the right instance.
An Exact Online user account that is allowed to authorise third-party app connections. If your administrator restricts app connections, ask them to authorise the connection or to grant you that permission.
Your Exact Online account is on a different country instance (for example .nl, .be or .de)? Then use the base Exact Online connector (which lets you choose your region per connection) or Exact Online NL instead. Apps, tokens and divisions are not portable between Exact's country instances, so a non-UK account cannot authorise this connector.
If your environment has more than one administration (division), switch to the one you want this connection to use before you authorise — the connection binds to whichever administration you are working in at that moment.

Steps

Open Apideck Vault (either the hosted Vault link or the Vault modal embedded in the application you are connecting from).
Find Exact Online (UK) in the list of integrations and select Connect.
Select Authorize. You are redirected to Exact Online's UK sign-in page.
Sign in with your Exact Online UK credentials and grant access to the app when Exact asks you to confirm.
You are returned to Vault and the connection shows as connected. Apideck stores and refreshes the tokens for you — nothing else needs to be entered for reads to start working.

That is the whole authorisation flow. The optional settings below only matter for specific features.

Which administration (division) does the connection use?

Right after you authorise, Apideck detects the division (administration) your Exact Online user is currently working in and stores it on the connection as the system division. Every request then runs against that administration by default — you do not enter the division id yourself.

If your Exact Online environment has more than one administration, you do not need a second connection for each one:

Call GET /accounting/companies to list the divisions available to the authorised user.
Send the division id you want in the x-apideck-company-id request header on any accounting call. When that header is present it takes precedence over the division stored on the connection; when it is absent, the stored division is used.

If the connection ended up on the wrong administration, switch to the administration you want in the Exact Online interface and reconnect — or simply target the right division with the x-apideck-company-id header.

Optional connection settings

These are all optional and live on the connection in Vault. Leave them empty unless the matching feature below applies to you.

Bank Journal — required to record payments

Setting: Bank Journal (bank_journal_code).

Recording a payment or a bill payment through Apideck writes a bank entry in Exact Online, and Exact requires a journal for that entry. Pick your bank journal from the dropdown (it is loaded live from your administration's journals) before creating payments. Without it, Exact rejects the write with an Invalid journal error. A single call can also override the setting by passing pass_through[journal_code].

Purchase Journal

Setting: Purchase Journal (purchase_journal_code).

This field exists for recording bills (purchase invoices). Bills are read-only on this UK connector (see the note below), so you can leave it empty today; it becomes relevant only if bill writes are added later.

Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss classification titles — usually needed on a UK administration

Settings: Assets Titles, Liabilities Titles, Equity Titles (Balance Sheet) and Income Titles, Cost of Goods Sold Titles, Expenses Titles, Other Income Titles, Other Expenses Titles (Profit & Loss).

The Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss reports group your general-ledger accounts by the first-level classification headings of your administration's scheme. The built-in defaults are the Dutch RGS headings, because this connector shares its report logic with the Exact Online NL connector. A UK administration normally uses statutory English headings instead (Fixed assets, Capital and reserves, Creditors: amounts falling due within one year, and so on), so most of them are not recognised out of the box and those accounts fall back to coarser groupings.

Check your Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss output first. If a section total looks wrong or empty, enter your own first-level headings in these fields. The Balance Sheet & Profit and Loss configuration guide explains each field and walks through reading the exact heading names out of your own administration.

Notes

Bills are read-only on this connector. You can list bills (purchase invoices) as summary records and fetch an individual bill for its full detail including line items, and everything else on the write side works normally — sales invoices, journal entries, addresses, invoice items, payments and bill payments can all be created. What this connector does not do is create, update or delete bills: purchase invoices have to be entered in Exact Online itself, or through the base Exact Online / Exact Online NL connectors, which do support bill writes for the regions they cover.

Payments post a bank entry; they do not reconcile the invoice. Creating a payment or bill payment records the bank entry in Exact Online, but it does not match that entry against the open invoice. Matching stays a manual step in the Exact Online interface. Related vendor limits: updating a payment only changes its description, payment method and payment reference; Exact Online's REST API does not support deleting payments or bill payments, or updating bill payments.

Connections that sit idle expire. Apideck refreshes your tokens automatically while the connection is used, and each refresh replaces the previous token. If the connection goes unused for 30 days, Exact Online expires the refresh token and the connection has to be authorised again in Vault. Nothing is lost — you re-run the short flow above and the same administration is detected again.

Troubleshooting

"Authorization failed" or Exact does not show a consent screen. Check that you signed in on the UK instance (start.exactonline.co.uk) and that your Exact user is permitted to authorise third-party app connections. If a non-UK account was used, this connector cannot complete the flow — use the base Exact Online connector or Exact Online NL for that region.

The connection stopped working / requests return an authorisation error. The likeliest cause is an idle connection whose refresh token expired after 30 days. Open Vault and authorise the connection again.

Data comes back from the wrong company. The connection is bound to the division your Exact user was working in at the moment you authorised. List the divisions with GET /accounting/companies and pass the one you want in the x-apideck-company-id header, or reconnect while the correct administration is active in Exact Online.

Creating a payment fails with Invalid journal. No bank journal is set. Choose your bank journal in the Bank Journal connection setting, or send pass_through[journal_code] on the request.

Balance Sheet or Profit & Loss sections look wrong or empty. Your administration's classification headings are not matching the Dutch RGS defaults. Configure the classification-title settings as described in the Balance Sheet & Profit and Loss configuration guide.

Creating a bill returns an unsupported-operation error. Bill writes are not available on this connector — create the purchase invoice in Exact Online, then read it back through Apideck.

Requests start failing with 429. Exact Online caps how many API calls an app may make against your administration per minute and per day. The connection is fine — the limit is being hit by the integration's traffic, not by anything you configured. Apideck passes Exact's retry-after value back, so if this keeps happening, report it to whoever built the integration; the current limits are listed on this connector's overview.

Still stuck? Reach out to Apideck Support.