Industries
Every client's deadline is the same date as every other client's. That is the whole problem.
How it works today
The average Dutch accountancy or bookkeeping firm has 6.5 FTE and serves hundreds of clients whose deadlines all fall on the same dates. Four VAT rounds a year, the becon schedule for income tax returns, annual accounts due within ten months of year end. The relatiebeheerder, the client-facing accountant, asks for eleven documents, gets four back, and is the only record of which seven are still missing. For sixty clients at once.
A file sits in waiting-on-client. What it is waiting for, and how many days are left until the filing date, is written down nowhere. The request went out by e-mail, so there is no shared status, no automatic reminder and no countdown. In annual accounts season that pile grows faster than anyone can work through it, and the firm finds out in April which files will not make it.
Scan-en-herken, OCR that reads an invoice and proposes a journal entry, sat at 91.7 percent of firms in 2024, up from roughly half in 2013. The package automates the extraction, not the judgement: the VAT code, the cost centre, whether it is an investment, whether the supplier exists in the creditor master data at all. Exceptions wait until somebody picks them up, and that is usually the week before the filing date.
Four VAT rounds, an annual accounts season and the becon filing schedule put the pressure on the same weeks every year. More than 35 percent of firms name peak load as their biggest challenge. Hiring does not fix it: over 12 percent of positions are vacant and a vacancy for an accountant or tax adviser stays open eight months on average. Billable hours per employee fell 3.9 percent to around 976 in 2024.
The ledger package knows what has been posted, the tax package what has been filed, the compilation software where the annual accounts stand. Ask any of the three which clients will not make 1 May and none of them answers, because a filing date is not a field in any of them. In the Netherlands 31 percent of firms name limited integrations as their main frustration. So the date lives in a spreadsheet per branch, and only whoever maintains it knows the real position.
What we build for this sector
Not a menu of products. These are the pieces that tend to pay for themselves first in this line of work.
Not another scanning tool. What belongs around it: intake from whatever channel a client actually uses, duplicate detection, rules for VAT code, cost centre and project, and exceptions routed to a person instead of onto a pile. Then delivery into whichever package that client sits in, Exact Online, Twinfield or SnelStart. Including the hole go2UBL left when it stopped as a standalone service on 31 December 2025.
Part of Document & Invoice AutomationPut every client and every service on the calendar that actually binds: the VAT round, the becon schedule, the annual accounts, the payroll filing. The system counts down to the date, shows who is stuck and on what, and escalates to the relatiebeheerder once the date is moving faster than the file. Every step is logged, so the submission and approval history comes straight out of the system at your quality review.
Part of Business Process AutomationThe client logs in and sees their own PBC list, the prepared-by-client checklist, with the date attached: what arrived, what is missing, what is waiting for a signature, how many days are left. Uploads go straight in, signing is digital, both sides read the same status. PinkWeb and Mijn Kantoor do this well, but generically and vendor-locked. Own-build wins when several packages sit behind it, or the Wwft client due diligence belongs in the same portal.
Part of Customer & Partner PortalsNBA and NOREA published their AI guidance, Leidraad 2, on 4 June 2026. The line it draws: AI is fine, but validation and professional judgement stay the basis, and no black box. That is how we build it. AI proposes, the accountant approves, the system logs both. In practice: questions answered from a client file, anomalies flagged before filing rather than in the VAT correction afterwards, draft advisory letters from the figures.
Part of AI IntegrationNmbrs retires SOAP in 2027 and points new work at REST, which is a date already in your diary that nobody planned for. Around it: Exact Online has a documented REST API scoped per administration, SnelStart requires OAuth, a webhook URL and a certification step before production, Twinfield and Silverfin run developer portals, AFAS works through connectors. The wiring between them is ours to write, including the mapping to RGS.
Part of System Integrations & APIsThe seven numbers a firm steers on currently sit in four systems: billability, realisation rate, effective hourly rate, productivity per FTE, work in progress, invoice lead time and retention. We pull them together from timesheets, invoicing and CRM, with staffing set against the weeks that are going to be busy. Plus the screens nobody sells but everybody needs: file handover, becon deadline tracking, and the spreadsheet one branch has quietly maintained for years.
Part of Internal Tools & Admin PanelsSystems we connect to
The sharpest detail here is RGS. Five levels, the fifth of which, the mutation level, exists specifically for accountants, with RGS Ready certification through rgsready.nl and a register kept by GBNED. Map one administration at account level and another at section level, and a dashboard across four hundred clients is comparing two different things.
This is not an exhaustive list, and we are not a reseller for any of it. If a system has an API, a database, or an export, we can usually work with it. If it does not, we will tell you that before you spend anything.
Rules you work under
The quality review arrives on a cycle you do not set: a six-year accreditation cycle with development conversations in between, and a shorter interval as soon as you do audit work. At that moment the question is not whether the work was done properly, but whether you can show that it was, in files from three years ago.
What changes
Today
Bookkeeping sits in Exact Online for most clients, an older portfolio from an acquisition is still on Twinfield, and a handful of clients run SnelStart. Invoices arrive through Basecone, hours go into Simplicate, payroll runs in Nmbrs for 180 employers. Documents are requested by e-mail and tracked in a spreadsheet per branch. Every VAT round costs the office manager two full days of chasing. In annual accounts season the waiting-on-client pile passes a hundred files.
After
One submission and progress system on top of the existing packages. Per client, per service, VAT, income tax, annual accounts and payroll, a PBC list with a status and a date. The client logs into a portal in the firm's own branding, sees exactly what is outstanding, uploads directly and signs digitally. Reminders go automatically and escalate to the relatiebeheerder. What arrives is pushed by API into Exact Online, Twinfield or SnelStart, depending on where that client sits. One dashboard per branch: ready, blocked, blocked on what, days to the filing date.
The result
The quarterly round becomes a dashboard view instead of two days of chasing. Submission moves earlier, so the peak flattens rather than climbs. The approval history sits there per file, and 1 May becomes a date you work towards instead of one that arrives.
An illustrative scenario based on how work in this sector is typically organised, not a specific client.
Questions from this sector
In a ten-country survey, 32 percent of businesses switched accounting software in the past year and 47 percent are weighing it. That mostly moves the problem: the gap was never inside one package, it sits between them. So we do not replace Exact, AFAS, Twinfield, Nextens or Nmbrs. We build the layer in between, which is exactly the layer no vendor has an incentive to build. If your package genuinely ships it within six months, waiting for it is cheaper than paying us.
Yes, provided it is arranged properly, and that is part of the build. Authorisation per file and per employee, a processing agreement, hosting inside the EU, and an audit log recording who saw or changed what and when. Retention is set to the seven-year Dutch tax retention obligation, with documented deletion after it. That log is not overhead: at a quality review it is exactly what you would otherwise reconstruct by hand.
Every build has to remove a screen, not add one, and that is the test we apply ourselves. An accountant spends on average eight hours a month on timesheets. Those hours do not all come back as billable hours, but at a rate of around 95 euro, recovering half of them is roughly 380 euro per employee per month. In a survey of more than a hundred accountants (Maxiality, October 2024) three-quarters reported less stress once registration ran automatically.
Not in March or April. So we never propose a go-live in peak season. The rhythm that works: discovery over the summer, build in Q3 and Q4, live before the first VAT round of the new year and in any case before 1 May, when the becon extension has to be requested. After that the filing schedule runs, and deviating from it can affect your extension in later years. We also ship in pieces, so the first part is running while the rest is still being built.
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Describe how the work flows now, including the parts held together by spreadsheets. We will tell you what is worth building and what is not.
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