The challenge
BIYU runs a peer-to-peer rental marketplace out of Amsterdam. The team is small, there is no full-time finance hire, and the books live in Exact Online. In early 2024 the company brought on a part-time controller, then went through a tight cash period that imposed the kind of discipline most companies never get to practice on purpose: every euro of outgoing cash had to be defensible, every supplier line accounted for. BIYU came out of that period intact.
The discipline didn't leave when the cash situation eased. Coming out, the founder kept the same rule: nothing gets paid without me seeing it. Every supplier invoice, every recurring cost. A manually maintained creditor file (name, amount, invoice number, paid date) was the spine of that discipline. It worked, but it cost hours a week and lived in one person's head.
A second constraint compounded it: the controller who had pulled BIYU through the tight period was down to roughly one day a week, and the cost line had to come down too. The founder wanted the same controller relationship for less time. Not a new system, not a new hire.
When I open Exact I get goosebumps. I want to close everything.
Frans Biegstraaten, founder of BIYU
The solution
The introduction came through the investor side: after meeting Jeroen and Michael from Nance during a fund-raising cycle, the founder kept in touch. By late 2025 the threads converged. BIYU needed to take controller hours down, and Nance needed early customers running real workflows. BIYU signed up in November 2025.
What sold the founder wasn't a feature list. It was that Nance plugs straight into Exact and the inbox, and works as a thinking partner for someone who actively dislikes opening Exact.
It was very easy to install. Connected to all the systems quickly. You saw the first effects fast: the mailbox just runs by itself.
Frans Biegstraaten, founder of BIYU
The early period also produced one of Nance's standard workflows. BIYU needed a credit-card reconciliation flow that didn't exist in the product. Rather than ship it as a one-off, the team built it as a reusable workflow on the assumption that other customers would need the same. They did. It is now a standard pattern in the Nance library.
How BIYU runs finance with Nance
Nance shows up across three layers of BIYU's finance function: workflows that run on a schedule, a sales-invoice generator that turns a Google Drive doc into Exact entries, and a sparring-partner role for the founder during VAT and year-end.
1. Scheduled workflows
Set up in chat by the controller during onboarding, running without intervention since:
| Workflow | What it does |
|---|---|
| Invoice mailbox routing | Forwards inbound supplier mail to a scan service, gets the structured invoice back into Exact |
| Credit-card reconciliation | The flow built for BIYU, now a standard Nance workflow used by other customers |
| Monthly actuals dashboard | A management-level actuals overview, produced for the end of each month |
2. The sales-invoice generator
BIYU populates a single Google Drive document per billing cycle with the customer, the article, and the GL codes. The controller or the founder then asks Nance to "make all sales invoices." Nance reads the file, generates the invoices in Exact against the right relations and account codes, and hands the draft back for one final review before sending.
It is essentially the opposite of what we do with purchase invoices: we make a per-customer overview with the article and the cost codes, Nance reads the file and produces exactly the invoices with the right ledger codes. That same pattern should work in both directions.
Frans Biegstraaten, founder of BIYU
The founder keeps the final "send" in human hands on purpose. Same reason as the creditor file: control beats speed for this team.
3. The accountant-replacement layer
Two periodic jobs that used to land on an external accountant now land on Nance first:
- VAT (BTW) declaration. The founder ran the entire declaration through Nance, one-to-one with the prep the accountant would have done. Nance surfaced a few corrections before filing.
- Year-end (jaarrekening) prep. Open questions from the accountant get pushed into Nance with the founder's added context. Nance comes back with a structured account of the position, including suggestions on items the founder hadn't thought about (e.g. how to treat intangible fixed assets), so the actual accountant meeting becomes a review, not an investigation.
It almost feels like a sparring session with a colleague.
I throw the accountant's question into Nance, fill in what I know, and Nance thinks along. The account it comes back with makes the actual meeting much more efficient than me digging through balance-sheet positions in Exact.
Frans Biegstraaten, founder of BIYU
The outcome
The clearest outcome is the time line. The same controller relationship, with the same person, has gone from roughly 20 hours a week to ~8 hours a month, and the founder thinks the floor is around 6. That is not a story about replacing the controller. It's a story about keeping her in the loop on the high-judgment work while Nance handles the loop-the-loop.
The second outcome is the discipline. The founder still maintains the manual creditor file by hand on purpose, because the habit of seeing every outgoing payment is worth protecting. But the work around that ritual (the mailbox watching, the Exact line-by-line check, the line-by-line VAT prep) is now Nance's.
The third outcome is what Nance proactively catches. The founder cited a small example: Nance flagged that the monthly actuals showed payroll lower than the prior month. The reason turned out to be that the payroll run hadn't fully exported to Exact yet. Small, but the kind of catch a non-finance founder wouldn't notice on their own.
In a good collaboration, you complement each other. I don't only get what I ask for. I get suggestions, or a noticing: 'this is odd, last March it was much less.' And then you go check.
Frans Biegstraaten, founder of BIYU
What's next
The founder's number one ask is more proactivity. Specifically: auto-populate the manually maintained creditor file from the Exact mailbox extraction. Nance already does the opposite direction (read a Drive doc, write Exact entries); the founder wants the reverse for inbound, so the file fills itself and the human stays in control of "pay now, pay later, pay never until they threaten a dwangbevel."
Two more, lower priority:
- Vacation-period triggers. When the controller doesn't check the inbox daily, Nance surfaces what needs paying.
- AR follow-up nudges for accounts with many open sales invoices.
The opposite of the sales-invoice flow should also be possible: Nance reads the inbox invoices and pushes the ones that need later payment into a single file. That's the next step I'd take with Nance.
Frans Biegstraaten, founder of BIYU
