From question to shareholder report: Claude on your Exact Online administration
The figures are done, and then the real work starts: turning those same figures into a story shareholders can read. In the video below Claude does that work, from the first question to a deck in your house style, directly on an Exact Online administration.
The demo, recorded in Dutch, runs on our own demo administration and starts with one sentence: show this year’s profit and loss statement, with an analysis. No export, no pivot table, no template that needs filling first. What happens in the minutes after that is exactly what the MCP connection was built for, and it is worth walking through step by step.
How Claude reaches your figures
Claude first works out which administration you mean. The connection in the video has one behind it, so it is found quickly; with several on your account, it asks which one it should be. Then comes the question whether it may look inside the administration. One click on allow, and the profit and loss statement appears in the conversation: the most recent period and the year to date, and on the follow-up question the same figures per month.
Under the hood Claude picks a tool from the connection per question: the financial report, the KPI set, an ageing analysis. The number-crunching happens in a deterministic calculation layer, so the same administration gives the same outcome, however often you ask. The language model only phrases the answer; the figures come straight from Exact Online.
No copy of your administration moves to the model along the way. Every question is a targeted query at the moment you ask it, through your own access, and every call lands in the audit log. How that protocol works we explained earlier in the knowledge base, in the piece on MCP.
"You are not reporting on last week’s export, but on the administration as it stands right now. And every follow-up question starts where the previous one left off."
The analysis that follows straight after
Fetching figures is half of it. The prompt in the video also asks for an analysis, and that is where it gets interesting: Claude looks at the whole series and names what stands out. If revenue grows fast while the cost of sales falls in absolute terms, it points out that those two do not fit together and that you want to know why. If revenue leans heavily on a handful of customers, it names that concentration risk. In a demo administration that is harmless; in a real one you want to know before your shareholders ask.
Those are directions, not verdicts: the places where you look first. The judgement stays with you, and because every finding rests on a concrete query, you can recompute it. The difference with a dashboard is the follow-up: why does March deviate, which entries sit behind it, what did the same month look like last year. Every answer is a new targeted query, not a new export.
From figures to shareholder report
Then the step that takes the most time in a monthly cycle: turning the figures into a piece shareholders can read. In the video that is one instruction, with a logo attached. The result is a complete deck: revenue and result, the monthly series in charts, tables with the key figures and a short explanation per topic.
- The instruction is one sentence. “Turn this into a presentation for our shareholders, in our house style.” The attached logo is enough to carry over the colours and typefaces.
- The content comes from the conversation. Claude builds the slides from the figures and the analysis it just fetched, and carries along context that came up earlier. In the demo it works out a normalisation for the Dutch customary salary of the two director-shareholders on its own, because it knows they are there.
- The result is an ordinary PowerPoint file. You open it, adjust a slide yourself or ask Claude for the change, and send it out like any other report.
What this is and is not
The deck is a draft, not a print-ready piece. The figures in it come straight from the administration, but the interpretation comes from a language model, so you read the whole thing before it goes to shareholders. Treat it as the work of a good assistant: it is on paper, you sign for it.
The entire demo is reading, not writing: nothing changes in Exact Online, and changes through the connection always require manual approval. The video also runs on a demo administration, so the amounts are not real; the route from question to report is exactly how it works on a real one.
The connection itself is not tied to Claude: the same connection works in ChatGPT and Microsoft 365 Copilot, because MCP is an open standard. The presentation step in the video does lean on what Claude itself can do, creating files and adopting a house style. The figures side runs through the same connection with every assistant.
Try it yourself
Connecting takes a few minutes: one address, sign in with your Exact Online account, pick the administration. Then start with the question from the video, this year’s profit and loss statement with an analysis, and see what comes out of your own figures. The shareholder report that follows is one more instruction.
