The challenge
Birò sells and services the Birò, a small Italian electric city car. They run a sales floor, a workshop full of mechanics, and a parts inventory split between Amsterdam and the Italian factory. The books live in Exact Online. The team on site is around ten people, several of whom are Italian colleagues who don't speak Dutch, which means Exact lookups used to be a translation problem before they were a data problem.
What they don't have is a back office. No controller, no analyst, no admin team. The work that a back office would normally handle (recurring management reporting, debtor and creditor follow-up, list pulls for marketing, bulk inventory updates, reconciliations when something doesn't tie out) has to land somewhere.
For a long time it landed on two finance employees and an external accountancy firm. Stock lived in spreadsheets and never linked to Exact. Purchase orders, including supplier lead times, were tracked by hand. Personnel admin was bridged manually. Credit card statements got typed in line by line. Debtor chasing (customers who pay days after delivery) ate hours every week.
The hardest gap was on the workshop floor. When a vehicle came back, the mechanic had no fast way to see what had been done to it before, who'd owned it then, what was under warranty, or how many hours had already gone in. The information was in Exact, just buried inside an archive of historical invoices that nobody had time to scroll.
Before we worked with Nance I had two people specifically on the financial side. Monthly reports out of Exact. After a month-end close you're always running a bit behind the facts. Priorities shift. Running behind the facts: that is what Nance is the solution for.
Pieter Vermeer, founder, Birò Nederland
The team had tried to solve this years earlier with a barcode system project. It was abandoned as too complex. That experience set the bar for the next attempt: anything new could not be a fresh system swap.
The solution
Birò didn't want to replace Exact. They wanted to reach into it (and into email, Drive, supplier portals and uploaded files) without rebuilding their stack.
Nance fit because it doesn't ask the customer to migrate. It connects to Exact, the inbox, Drive, and a password vault for automated logins. The same chat surface that pulls a repair history can also categorise a credit card line item, draft a debtor reminder, build a dashboard, run a multi year gross margin analysis, or push a CSV driven bulk update back into Exact.
The decisive part, only obvious in retrospect looking at the account, is what happened after onboarding. None of the five recurring reports the dealership now runs every week were configured by us. They built them in chat. They iterated on them in chat. When they wanted the daily sales dashboard delivered as a shareable link instead of an HTML attachment, they asked for it. When they wanted the dashboard CSS redesigned into a lighter, printable look, they asked for that.
We stood for a long time at the choice of whether to swap to a different system altogether. Nance took that uncertainty away. That lets you focus on the future. And the speed: within 24 hours you have a solution for the question you put in.
Pieter Vermeer, founder, Birò Nederland
How Birò runs the dealership with Nance
Nance shows up across three layers of the operation: scheduled reports that arrive on their own, ad-hoc lookups people do dozens of times a day, and back office work nobody else is doing.
1. Scheduled reports
Five recurring workflows run on the account without anyone touching them: a daily sales dashboard, a weekday management dashboard, a weekly debtor list, a weekly supplier payment list, and a one off scheduled run. Each builds an HTML overview from Exact Online and lands in the team's inboxes by email.
All five were configured by the customer themselves, in chat. None were set up during onboarding. Across the account, the scheduled side has executed hundreds of runs to date.
Every morning at eight sharp we get a dashboard via Nance. Daily, weekly, monthly, you can set it up your own way. We sit down with the team, grab a coffee, and walk through the results.
David Gaardon, sales manager, Birò
2. Ad-hoc lookups
Anyone in the team can ask Nance a question and get an answer in seconds without opening Exact. The single most repeated pattern in the whole account is the service history lookup: someone gives Nance a 4 digit meldcode (the last digits of the chassis), and gets back every visit on that vehicle, what was done, and what was charged. Used multiple times a day on the workshop floor.
A customer whose vehicle we've known for years. To invoice it before, we had to open one invoice, then the next. Now I type 'what's the service history of this meldcode' and the whole list appears in one glance.
David Gaardon, sales manager, Birò
The same pattern carries over to:
- Licence plate and customer name lookups. Find a vehicle or a customer in Exact and pull its history.
- Trade-in valuations. A one line message with a meldcode returns a trade-in value calculated against the dealership's own depreciation schedule. The valuation form behind it was built in a single chat session by dictating that schedule to Nance.
- Photo to quote. A customer sends a photo of a part. The team forwards it to Nance with one line. A draft quotation lands in Exact ready to send. The same pattern turns a paper repair note into a clean service quote.
- The Italian team workaround. Because chat is in plain language, the multilingual team on site can ask the same questions of Exact without going through a Dutch speaking colleague first.
3. Back office work
This is where Nance most visibly fills the gap left by the absent back office.
- Reconciliations. Whenever Exact doesn't match physical reality or a payment looks wrong, the team asks Nance to investigate. Why a stock count differs from the system. Why a refund won't link to its original invoice because the GL accounts don't match.
- Customer and marketing list pulls. "Every customer who bought a Birò in 2018 to 2019 and still owns it." "Every customer without a service in the last two years." Lists that would normally be a request to a data person, or an export and clean job in Excel, come out as a one line ask.
- Bulk Exact operations. CSV driven mass updates, for example deactivating a batch of articles in one go by setting an end date, pushed back into Exact directly.
- Warranty visibility. A category of work the team knew was happening but couldn't size: small jobs done under warranty, eating mechanic time without showing up cleanly in the books. Nance now surfaces how much time is actually going into warranty work, which feeds straight into pricing and supplier conversations.
- Multi step financial analysis. Over the course of a single evening, the team ran an end to end gross margin analysis on one of their main vehicle product lines: purchase costs across three years, sales for the same period plus year to date, inventory levels for the relevant items, and an interactive HTML dashboard summarising gross margin by year. They later asked Nance to redesign the dashboard into a lighter, printable layout.
- Supplier analysis with the Italian factory. Open supplier orders, ordered vs received reconciliations, and verification of transport documents per delivery. The team also caught stock that was sitting in the wrong warehouse (Amsterdam vs Italy) thanks to Nance flagging the mismatch.
- Bank reconciliation rules. A process design conversation about auto matching pin payment lines on the bank statement to the right outgoing customer invoices in Exact.
- Cross document analysis from uploads. Combining the team's own files with Exact data. For example an overview built from open customer orders combined with warranty receivables, sourced from two uploaded files plus Exact.
- HR and payroll questions. Occasional but real. "What is being withheld for pension this year?" Nance has become the natural place to ask any finance or admin question, not only the obvious ones.
- A mechanic floor dashboard. Articles used and labour booked per mechanic. The same reporting machinery the sales side uses is now also pointed at the service floor.
The outcome
The clearest immediate outcome is the one the org chart shows. There is no controller, no back office team, and the dealership still gets a daily sales dashboard at 08:30, a daily management dashboard at 08:00 on weekdays, a debtor list every Tuesday morning, and a supplier payment list every Thursday morning. All without anyone touching anything.
The workshop floor outcome is the one mechanics feel. A returning vehicle no longer means a from scratch investigation. The meldcode is enough.
The compounding outcome is what the team can now do that they couldn't before. A multi year gross margin analysis on a vehicle product line (pull purchases, pull sales, cross reference inventory, build a dashboard) used to be the kind of thing you'd outsource or simply not do. Now it's an evening's chat. Same shape for marketing list pulls, bulk Exact updates, and reconciliations the team would otherwise leave to month end.
Nance is a full time employee that takes over a lot of tasks for us. The ideal employee on the financial side.
Pieter Vermeer, founder, Birò Nederland
The unexpected use case turned out to be the one that landed fastest. In the second conversation, Pieter put a photo of a paper repair note on the table and asked whether Nance could read it. A week later the option was live: one photo, one upload, the whole repair staged in Exact ready to send.
Asked to describe Nance in three words, David and Pieter landed in nearly the same place. David: flexibility, insight, personal contact. Pieter: trust, better overviews, calm.
What's next
Next on Birò's roadmap with Nance: deepening the mechanic floor dashboard, completing the bank reconciliation rule design so pin payment lines auto match outgoing invoices in Exact, and continuing to iterate on the recurring dashboards in the same way they always have, by describing what they want.
I trust that Nance can grow with Birò. If we expand to multiple locations, stock gets harder to track and things get more complex. Nance is the right tool for that. The lines between us are short, and that is what keeps the improvement coming.
Pieter Vermeer, founder, Birò Nederland
