Most people treat their accounting like an archive: you put something in, and when you want it back, you go looking. Log in, find the right overview, set a period, export. But an administration does not have to be a filing cabinet. These days you can simply talk to it.
That sounds like a marketing line, so let us be precise about what it is and is not.
What talking to your accounting literally means
You type a question into your AI assistant, in the language you would use yourself:
“Which customers still have invoices outstanding for more than 30 days?”
And you get an answer. Not a report you still have to read, not a spreadsheet you still have to filter — the answer itself, with the names and the amounts in it. Then you follow up: “which of those have we not heard from this month?” That is the difference from searching. Searching starts over every time; a conversation builds on itself.
Why this is not the same as using AI for your accounting
There is an important distinction that often gets blurred. A language model you ask how to depreciate an investment answers from its general knowledge. That can be useful, but it knows nothing about your figures.
Talking to your accounting works the other way round. The AI understands your question and then retrieves the answer from your own administration. So the figures come from Exact Online, not from the model. That difference decides whether you can trust the answer.
| Question | Plain AI chat | Talking to your accounting |
|---|---|---|
| “What is my revenue this quarter?” | Cannot know | The figure from your ledger |
| “Which debtor is slowest?” | Cannot know | Name, amount and number of days |
| “How does reverse-charge VAT work?” | Explains it | Explains it |
That bottom row is exactly why you want it in the same chat: explanation and your own figures side by side, in one conversation.
Ten questions to start with
Not a checklist, but a sense of how broad this is:
- How much is outstanding with debtors, and with whom?
- Which invoices are overdue and for how long?
- What was my revenue last month compared with the same month last year?
- Which costs rose fastest this quarter?
- Are there duplicate entries in my purchase invoices?
- Which ledger account do I use for shipping costs?
- How much VAT do I owe this quarter?
- Which customers have not ordered anything yet this year?
- Does my bank balance match the latest statements?
- Which supplier has become the most expensive this year?
Note that none of these questions refers to a screen, a report name or a ledger number. That is no longer necessary. More examples are in the prompt library.
How it works under the bonnet
Between your AI assistant and Exact Online sits a connection built on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets AI assistants talk to external systems. Ledger Botje is that connection for Exact Online.
What happens when you ask a question:
- Your assistant reads your question and works out which data it needs.
- It requests that through the connection — outstanding items or ledger entries, for instance.
- Ledger Botje fetches them from your Exact Online administration.
- Your assistant phrases the answer in plain language.
This takes seconds and you see none of it. If you want to know exactly which data can be requested, that is listed on the MCP tools page.
Does it talk back? On write access
A conversation that only gives answers is already worth a lot. But you can go further. Turn on write access and the conversation can change something too: create a sales order, adjust an invoice line, prepare a reminder.
By default the connection is read-only. That is deliberate: starting with looking is less daunting than starting with posting, and you enable writing once you trust what you see. You can also set per AI assistant which actions are allowed. How that works is on the security page.
What to watch out for
Three things that make the difference in practice:
Be specific about the period. “How is revenue doing?” gets you a vague answer. “What was revenue in July 2026 versus July 2025?” gets you two figures and a difference.
Follow up rather than start over. The power is in the second and third question. From a revenue figure to the customers behind it, from those customers to their payment behaviour — that is a route you would never casually take in a report.
Check what you are going to use. For a quick indication the answer is enough. If it is going into a meeting or a tax return, verify the figure against what you see in Exact Online. That is not distrust of the technology, it is simply how you handle figures.
Who is this for?
Business owners who do not want to call their accountant every time they need a number. Finance staff who spend more time building reports than drawing conclusions from them. Accountants who run the same four checks per client and would rather handle that in one conversation — see Ledger Botje for accountants.
What they share: the figures are already there. It simply takes too much effort to get to them.
Getting started
You connect Exact Online to your AI assistant once. It takes about five minutes and involves no code — the steps per assistant are on MCP setup. After that you talk to your administration from ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot or Gemini.
A good first question to check that it is working: “Which invoices are currently outstanding?” If your own customers come back, you are set.
Ready to talk to your accounting? Try Ledger Botje free for 14 days and ask your first question. More on what else is possible is on AI accounting for Exact Online.