The integration is live, now what? This post is not about installing - that is covered step by step on the ChatGPT page. This is about the week after: what to ask first, what you get back, and where ChatGPT is specifically strong and weak when it comes to your administration.
Where does ChatGPT stand out?
ChatGPT is strong at combining your administration with text you paste into it. An email from a customer, a quotation PDF, a list of item codes from a spreadsheet: you can put those next to your Exact Online data in the same conversation. That is exactly the work that otherwise consists of clicking back and forth between two screens.
With Code Interpreter you can also ask for an Excel file or a chart as the end result. Ask for a revenue breakdown per product group and you get not only the figures but a file you can forward.
Three questions to start with
Deliberately pick questions whose answer you can already verify. That builds trust before you start leaning on it.
- "Which sales invoices have been outstanding for more than 30 days?" — You get a list with customer, amount and age. Check two of them against Exact Online. This is the single most used question in practice.
- "What is the stock of item A1001 per warehouse?" — Watch whether the split per location is right. If you only see a total, a warehouse is probably missing from your selection.
- "Find the orders for customer Bakery Jansen from the past two months." — Deliberately test a customer name spelled slightly differently than in Exact Online. You should get a suggestion list back, not an empty result.
What you will run into
Three things almost everyone meets in the first week.
You have to name the administration. If you manage several, ChatGPT does not know which one you mean. Name it in your question, or have it switch first. Forget that and you get an answer from the wrong set of books without noticing.
Vague questions produce vague answers. "How is revenue doing?" is too open. "What was revenue per month in the second quarter, compared to last year?" produces something usable. The more concrete the question, the less room for interpretation.
Long conversations lose the thread. Go from stock to invoices to projects in one conversation and ChatGPT may mix up earlier context. Start a new conversation for a new subject.
When do you turn on write access?
Not in week 1. Start read-only - that is also the default. This way you learn how the assistant interprets your questions without a misunderstanding changing anything in your books.
If after a week the answers are consistently right, enable write access for one bounded task. Creating sales orders only, for instance, and checking them before you finalise. More on that on the security page.
Where to go next
If the above works, the logical next step is the prompt library: ready-made questions per subject you can copy. Wondering whether ChatGPT is the right choice alongside the built-in Exact assistant? Read the comparison.