By now you know which numbers you are missing and why your accounting does not show them. The question then is what you do about it. There are four routes, and they are rarely laid side by side. Usually a business rolls into the first and stays there until it hurts.
This article does lay them side by side, including what each route costs and where it runs aground.
Route 1: a spreadsheet next to Exact Online
By far the most chosen route, and for small numbers the right one.
What it does. You export invoices or ledger movements, clean up, separate recurring from one-off, normalise contract forms to a monthly value, lay this month next to last month and classify per customer what has happened. Out of that rolls an MRR, and with some extra work churn and retention.
What it costs. Seven manual steps, every month. At two hundred customers a morning, at five hundred a day. But the hours are not the real objection.
Where it runs aground. Four properties every manual process has, however well it is built. The file is out of date the moment it is finished: an overview ready on the twelfth describes last month. It is not reproducible: ask an investor or your accountant how you arrive at your MRR, and the answer is a file with hidden tabs and manual corrections, with no trail of which correction was made and why. It is a person and not a process, so a holiday or a departure fully interrupts your steering information. And every definition change breaks your historical series, because recalculating means someone has to go back by hand through all prior months.
When this is enough. Under a hundred subscriptions, and as long as whoever builds the file is around. The full manual method is covered in this article.
Route 2: the standard reporting in Exact Online
What it does. Excellent transaction overviews, revenue per ledger account, outstanding items, tax reporting. For what it is built for, there is nothing better.
Where it runs aground. It does not know the concept of subscription movement. The Subscription Management module does show your expected MRR, the growth of your subscriptions and cancellation reasons, but not the movement underneath: no MRR bridge with new, expansion, contraction and churn, no net retention, no cohort analysis. That is not a shortcoming; the question simply is not in it. An accounting system answers "what has been booked?". A subscription business has to answer "is my recurring revenue moving the right way?", and that is a comparison between bookings rather than a booking.
When this is enough. If you are not a subscription business. That sounds facile and it is not: for trade and for services on a time-and-materials basis, this is exactly the right reporting.
Route 3: a BI tool on your Exact Online data
Power BI, Looker Studio, or one of the off-the-shelf dashboards for Exact.
What it does. In principle everything. A BI tool can run any calculation you can formulate, and the well-known connectors with Exact Online work well.
Where it runs aground. On who builds and maintains it. A BI tool gives you a prettier view of the same transactions as long as no one puts the subscription logic into it. If you want MRR movement, churn and cohorts, someone has to build the data model: the classification rules, the normalisation, the month-on-month comparison, the historical series.
That is exactly the same work as in route 1, only once instead of every month. That is a gain. But the key-person risk does not disappear, it moves, from whoever understood the spreadsheet to whoever understood the data model, and that person is usually scarcer and more expensive.
When this is the right route. If you have and keep that capacity in house, and if you want more than subscription figures alone, for example because you also want production data or time tracking in the same picture.
Route 4: a reporting layer on your accounting
What it does. Reads your accounting in Exact Online as it already stands, and lays the subscription logic over it: classification, normalisation, month-on-month comparison, and from that MRR, churn, net retention, average revenue per customer and cohorts.
What it changes. The same four objections from route 1, reversed. The numbers follow your accounting instead of your monthly close. Every metric traces back to the underlying invoice lines, which is exactly what a due diligence or your accountant asks for. The rules are fixed in one place instead of in one person's head. And a definition change recalculates the whole series instead of breaking your history.
Where it runs aground. On the connection. If you do not run on Exact Online, this route is not there, that is a hard condition, not a plus. And it is an extra system next to your accounting, even though it does not add double administration.
Side by side
| Spreadsheet | Standard reporting | BI tool | Reporting layer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MRR and build-up | Manual | No | If you build it | Yes |
| Churn and retention | Manual | No | If you build it | Yes |
| Cohorts | Rarely | No | If you build it | Yes |
| Timeliness | Last month | Realtime, wrong question | Depends on the build | Follows your accounting |
| Traceable to invoice lines | No | Yes | Depends on the build | Yes |
| Dependent on one person | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Cost side included | Manual | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The fifth route, that no one calls a choice
There is one more route that appears in no comparison because it does not seem a choice: doing nothing. Carrying on with revenue and bank balance, and assuming all is well as long as revenue rises.
That is by far the most chosen route, and it is defensible as long as you are small enough to keep your customer base in your head. The problem is that no one notices when that point is passed. Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred subscriptions that sense disappears, not gradually but abruptly, and from that moment you rely on the system to tell you.
What to watch for when choosing
Whichever route you take, these four questions decide whether it works:
- Is there a direct connection to your accounting? Without a connection you only move the export problem.
- Is the coverage complete? MRR, churn, net retention, average revenue per customer and cohorts. A subset leaves open exactly the questions you already cannot answer now.
- Is your history recalculable? If you adjust a definition, does your whole series move with it? If not, you buy the same limitation in new packaging.
- Can you click through to the source data? From every metric to the invoice lines beneath it. Otherwise you move the trust problem instead of solving it.
RecurBoard
RecurBoard is route four. It connects to Exact Online, reads your subscription management as it stands, and builds from that MRR, churn, NRR, ARPA and cohorts, per segment, traceable to the underlying lines.
What you should know before you connect: your data is hosted within the EEA, there is a data processing agreement under Article 28, encryption is AES-256-GCM and TLS 1.2 or higher, and data breaches are reported within 48 hours. What is not there: ISO 27001 and SOC 2. Those certifications are not demonstrated, and it seemed better to us to say so here than to let you discover it yourself.
Connecting takes a minute via OAuth, no credit card is needed, and you have 45 days to see whether the numbers match what you already suspected.
Try RecurBoard free for 45 days
Connect via OAuth to Exact Online, no credit card, and see whether the numbers match what you already suspected. Want the problem sharper first? The whitepaper The blind spot is online ungated.