When do you outgrow Exact Online? And is Globe+ really such a big step up?

For many organisations, Exact Online is a logical choice. You work in the cloud, can get started relatively quickly and have access to a wide range of features for a clear, fixed price. For many companies, this fits in perfectly with their needs. But organisations change.

A company that once started out with a relatively simple administrative system may, years later, have multiple branches, operate internationally, process thousands of transactions and have built up a whole ecosystem of specialised applications centred around Exact.

• A CRM.
• An online shop.
• A WMS.
• Planning.
• Service.
• HRM.
• BI.
• Industry-specific software.
• Internationalisation

And then, at some point, another question arises:

Is Exact Online still compatible with the way we currently run our business?

Exact Online has, above all, become very broad

In recent years, Exact Online has developed into a comprehensive platform offering solutions and extensions for an ever-increasing number of business processes.

That’s a strength.

But width and depth are not the same thing.

As organisations grow or their processes become more complex, requirements may arise that go beyond what is practical or economically viable within an online environment.

Consider larger transaction volumes, more complex logistics processes, increased administrative workload, international operations or an increasingly intensive best-of-breed application landscape.

That doesn’t mean that Exact Online is suddenly the wrong solution.

It may simply mean that the organisation has changed since the decision to adopt Exact Online was made.

International growth is more than just a different currency

You see this, for example, when an organisation expands internationally.

Foreign accounting isn’t just about dollars, pounds or zlotys.

You will have to deal with local laws and regulations, tax rules, reporting requirements, bank formats and other country-specific requirements.

Exact explicitly positions Globe+ within that international context. According to Exact, Globe+ is available as standard in more than 30 countries, with support for the relevant local laws and regulations, languages, currencies and various international banking formats.

That is a fundamental difference.

And importantly: an integration platform does not change that difference.

Clickker® | The dedicated API for Exact makes Exact accessible to other applications.

However… it does not add any German, Polish or Belgian legislation to Exact Online and does not alter the functional capabilities of the ERP system itself.

The choice between Online and Globe+ should therefore be made, first and foremost, on the basis of business operations.

A ‘best-of-both-worlds’ strategy involves different requirements

There is another trend we are seeing a lot of. Companies are increasingly less likely to expect a single ERP package to do everything. Instead, they choose the best application for a specific process.

A specialised WMS for the warehouse. A CRM for sales. An online shop for e-commerce. A planning tool. Industry-specific software.

And Exact for the processes in which Exact forms the heart of the organisation.

Best-of-breed.

That can be a very powerful strategy. But there is one condition: all those applications must be able to communicate with one another.

And that means the technical integration of your ERP is becoming increasingly important.

That’s when API limits suddenly become relevant

Exact Online has a REST API for this purpose. This makes it possible to connect all sorts of external applications to the environment.

However, API capacity is not unlimited.

With a limited number of integrations, that needn’t be a problem at all.

But suppose a WMS is constantly querying stock levels, a webshop is generating orders, a CRM is exchanging customer data, and a BI solution is reading data from Exact.

Then the calculation changes.

Not because an API limit is wrong in itself, but because the way the platform is used is changing.

Exact Online therefore also offers Volume Packs within its Premium editions for organisations that require more API traffic, processing capacity or storage. Such a Volume Pack currently costs €250 per month. Exact also states that, for the Premium edition, the average volume is less than 25,000 booking lines per account per month, with options for expansion.

That’s a great solution if you simply need a bit of extra capacity.

But when you keep adding capacity on an ongoing basis to ensure your operations run smoothly, an interesting question arises once again: are we upgrading our subscription, or have we actually outgrown the platform?

So why not just go to Globe+?

That might sound like the logical next step.

If your organisation needs greater depth, is expanding internationally and has an increasing number of processes relating to Exact, you should look into Globe+.

Globe+ positions Exact as a more comprehensive ERP system for both financial and logistics business processes, including procurement, delivery, production, finance, HR and CRM.

Nevertheless, we find that organisations are sometimes quite reluctant. Not just because of the ERP migration itself, but also because of everything surrounding Exact.

Because there’s a lot of historical baggage there.

“But Exact Globe doesn’t have an API. That means we’ll have to have all our integrations rebuilt.”

For organisations that have been using Exact for some time, this is not an unfamiliar concept.

Traditionally, integrating Globe with other applications often meant that consultants and developers had to work out how to set up a specific connection.

A database, a script, an SDK solution, BPA tools, imports and exports, or a bespoke integration developed specifically for that particular situation.

That can work very well, but with every subsequent application, part of the technical challenge started all over again.

And that’s when the realisation dawned: Globe is powerful, but if we want to integrate other applications with it, things get complicated and costly.

For an organisation with a ‘best-of-both-worlds’ strategy, this could be a significant hurdle.

But what if you could access Globe+ via an API after all?

And that is precisely where we need to distinguish between two separate discussions.

Which ERP solution is best suited to our business operations?
How do we integrate that ERP system with the rest of our application landscape?

Our Clickker® | The dedicated API for Exact does not change the answer to the first question.

But it is the starting position for the second one.

With Clickker, we make functionality and data from Globe+ available to external applications via REST API endpoints.

Conceptually, it then becomes very simple:

External application ↔ Clickker ↔ Globe+

A WMS therefore does not need to know how Globe+ works from a technical point of view. Neither does an online shop. And the same applies to CRM, planning, BI or industry-specific software.

Clickker acts as the API for Exact Globe+.

Incidentally, an API does not mean that consultancy will disappear

We consider that distinction to be important.

If you switch from Exact Online to Globe+, Globe+ will still need to be set up properly.

Your business processes need to be understood. Accounting systems need to be set up. Master data must be accurate. Authorisations need to be defined. And international laws and regulations must be in line with those of the countries in which you operate.

To this end, knowledge of Exact and of business processes remains important.

Clickker does not replace that consultancy.

What we do want to avoid, however, is a situation where every integration with an external application automatically turns into another large-scale, bespoke technical project.

That’s a completely different matter.

Moreover, the business logic remains in place

For example, an API tells an online shop how to create an order in Exact.

But that still doesn’t tell you when that order can be processed, what checks are required, how items are mapped, which system takes precedence for stock, or what needs to be done when data is missing.

That’s process logic.

Within Sense-Cloud, we use Clickker Automation Suite for this – our visual low-code flow builder – which allows you to set up flows between applications exactly as you want, without having to do too much programming.

This creates a clear distinction:

Clickker unlocks Exact.
CAS determines the integration flow and business logic.
Our monitoring tool, Watcher, checks whether those integrations and workflows are functioning as intended.

This means that a comprehensive best-of-breed landscape does not necessarily mean that another collection of standalone, bespoke integrations will emerge around Globe+.

So look beyond the licence fee

A comparison between Exact Online and Globe+ based solely on monthly licence fees only tells part of the story.

The interesting question is what the overall running of the business entails.

How many transactions do we process?
Just how complex are our logistics?
In how many countries do we operate?
Which local legislation should we support?
How many accounts do we have?
What other applications do we use alongside Exact?
How much data do these systems exchange?
And how do we expect this landscape to develop in the coming years?

In that case, Exact Online may still be exactly the right solution.

However, it may also turn out that an organisation remains primarily in Exact Online because the alternative is associated with a costly implementation and a landscape full of expensive bespoke integrations.

The latter is no longer necessarily a given.

Perhaps that is why this is the wrong question

“Is Exact Online cheaper than Globe+?”

Of course, costs play a part. But what’s more interesting is:

“Which Exact environment would we choose if we were to review our business operations from scratch today?”

Without taking into account the long-standing fear of complex integrations. Without assuming that every application built around Globe+ requires bespoke development.

And with the option to access Globe+ via a modern API.

Because when your organisation outgrows Exact Online, the decision to move to a more comprehensive ERP system should be based primarily on what your business needs.

Not about whether you’ll still be able to pair it later on.