Exact reporting falls short for production: how to get live figures in one dashboard

Short answer. Exact's standard reports cover finance, not the shop floor. That is why you export to Excel and work with yesterday's figures. The solution is not to switch software, but to connect Exact to your production data through the API and show everything in one dashboard that refreshes itself.

I see it at nearly every manufacturer I walk into. Exact runs smoothly for the bookkeeping, but the moment someone wants to know how many orders went out on time this week, the Excel work begins. Someone exports a report, pastes it into a spreadsheet, adds a tab with time tracking, and on Monday afternoon delivers an overview of Friday. You are steering on yesterday's figures.

Why Exact reports fall short for production

Exact is strong at financial reporting. General ledger, accounts receivable, VAT: that is rock solid. The software simply was not built to track the shop floor down to the production ticket. Questions like "what is my actual cost price per order", "how many machine hours are still open" or "which orders are at risk of missing their delivery date" cannot be pulled from the standard reports.

The result is an export habit. You pull data into Excel because that is the only place where you can bring financial figures, timesheets and planning data together. That works, until you count how many hours a week go into all that linking and pasting, and how often a formula dragged down incorrectly feeds a wrong decision.

What you actually want: control, not just time savings

The goal is not "an hour less Excel". The goal is control. Figures that are correct at the moment you look at them. One place where the planner, the work preparer and you see the same number. Only when everyone steers on the same live figures can you spot a bottleneck on the shop floor before it becomes a late delivery.

Time savings are a pleasant side effect. The real gain is in decisions you make on today's data instead of last week's.

First examine the process, then build

Before I build anything, I lay the whole reporting flow on the table. In practice, a fair share of the Excel work has grown that way over time. A report once made for a single client that now circulates as standard. A tab nobody reads anymore. A duplicate entry because two departments do not trust each other.

I deliberately do not skip that step. Sometimes half of a weekly overview turns out to be redundant, and the other half is a KPI you are better off refreshing automatically every day. Cleaning up a process first prevents me from neatly automating manual work you no longer need at all. What remains is exactly what is worth building.

The smarter solution: connect Exact, do not replace it

You do not have to get rid of Exact. Exact Online has an API, and it is usable for pulling financial data automatically without anyone exporting by hand. Datakingdom and similar providers show that this works: data is collected automatically and placed in a data environment, ready for reporting (Datakingdom on automating Exact reports).

The core is that you bring three sources together:

1. Exact for the financial side: revenue, purchasing, cost price components.
2. Your production or planning data: hours, production tickets, machine utilization. In manufacturing this often comes from an APS package such as Limis or CAPE, or from a MES.
3. The shop floor registration: what was actually made, when, with how much rejection.

I connect those through the APIs and bring them together in one dashboard, for example in Power BI or a custom tool, that refreshes itself at a fixed interval. No export, no pasting, no version debate. One live number.

Build vs buy: why a standard reporting package rarely covers this

There are off-the-shelf Exact reporting tools, and for a purely financial overview they are fine. The problem starts with your exceptions. A standard package covers the happy path: standard orders, standard cost allocation, one administration. But your cost price per order depends on a surcharge you agreed yourself, you work with semi-finished products that run across multiple tickets, or you allocate machine hours differently than the package assumes.

That is exactly where a standard report drops out. It cannot do your cost allocation, your exceptions, your link between planning and finance. That is the moment to build. Not because building is always better, but because the standard does not cover your specific situation. When an off-the-shelf tool does cover it, I say so honestly and build nothing.