As an entrepreneur you want to focus on what you are good at and waste as little time as possible. Keeping track of orders, invoices, products and customers by hand takes a lot of it — and the more manual the process, the higher the chance something goes wrong.
The Bol.com link for sales partners transfers your webshop orders, products and customers into Invoice Office automatically. Invoices are created and sent for you, and the data is processed into your administration and accounting without being copied across. That leaves you time for what you are actually good at: doing business.
The setting that actually matters
Most marketplace connectors are all-or-nothing. This one has a document status setting that lets you choose how far to automate. It controls the status of documents created from a Bol.com order or shipment:
- Draft — the invoice is created but left in concept for you to check.
- Finalize — the invoice is finalised, ready to send.
- Finalize and send an email with a PDF — fully automatic; the customer gets their invoice without you touching it.
Start on Draft while you are building confidence in the setup, then move up. Going straight to fully automatic on day one means discovering any configuration problem at your customers’ expense.
The other decision: order or shipment
The source setting decides when an invoice is raised:
- Order — when the order is confirmed.
- Shipment — only when it is dispatched to the customer.
It is worth understanding how your orders and shipments relate before choosing. If you ship well after confirming, these produce noticeably different invoice dates — which affects which period the revenue falls into. Decide deliberately rather than accepting the default.
Test before you go live
The environment setting has Test and Live options. Use Test to check your API connection and the rest of your account configuration before real invoices start being created.
Your Bol.com credentials
Talking to the Bol.com retailer API needs a pair of credentials, created in your Bol.com seller portal:
- Client ID — the identifier the retailer API issues for an application, used to identify you to their servers.
- Secret — the client secret, known only to your application and the authorisation server.
Together they are how you authenticate. If you link Bol.com to more than one third party, create a separate set of credentials for each rather than reusing one.
Setting it up
The full step-by-step — every setting explained, and the document conditions to check afterwards — is in the help desk: Integrate your Bol.com account with Invoice Office.
In short: open the Bol.com connector’s settings, enter your client ID and secret, choose the document status, environment and source, and save. A switch on the same page enables the integration — and disables it again later if you need to.
Once it is running, check your document conditions are right, because they apply to the invoices the connector creates just as they do to the ones you raise yourself. Any doubts? Contact us.