Wytse Valkema of Kadoos about Combidesk

Wytse (32) has been an entrepreneur for half his life and sees opportunities everywhere. He started in e-commerce at the age of fifteen and is now building his scale-up, Kadoos.nl — a webshop full of customizable gifts with the goal of becoming the Netherlands’ leading corporate gifting platform. Thanks to the integrations between his quotation, invoicing, and accounting software, the company is scalable enough to make that happen.

“Kadoos.nl came about organically. We wanted to change the corporate gifting market. Personalization was already a trend, but in the Netherlands it was quite expensive. And if you wanted affordable options, you had to order large quantities abroad,” Wytse explains. “Companies were sourcing their gifts from everywhere. I saw an opportunity: a one-stop shop for personalized gifts that can be ordered individually and delivered the very next day.”

Wytse started with what he calls “the most complicated product possible”: fresh fruit. “If we could make that work, we could do it with anything.” The company grew quickly, and the concept was continuously refined. To keep costs low, they didn’t invest in fancy packaging — the fruit box was simply a plain cardboard box with a full-color sleeve around it.

“More and more customers started asking if their name or logo could be printed on that full-color sleeve,” Wytse recalls. “And I thought, if you can print the sleeve, it doesn’t matter what’s inside the box — fruit, wine, beer, chocolate, non-food items… That was the beginning of Kadoos.nl.”

Turning customers into fans

Today, Wytse supplies all kinds of gifts to all kinds of clients — from small and mid-sized businesses to major brands like ABN AMRO, pharmaceutical company Brocacef, and Jumbo Supermarkets. With the personalized gifts from Kadoos.nl, these companies can turn their customers into fans — the goal of nearly every modern organization.

“There’s nothing better than making people happy with a gift,” says Wytse. “And when that gift comes unexpectedly, or at an unexpected moment, it creates a real emotional bond between a company and its customers. Our role doesn’t stop at personalization — we also handle fulfillment as part of our service.”

A personalized gift platform of your own

For larger clients, Kadoos even builds fully branded gift platforms — with custom packaging, product selections, and design. A great example is the partnership with Jumbo Supermarkets. “The assignment was simple: Jumbo wanted to exceed customer expectations. It was our job to come up with the solution. We ultimately built a complete Jumbo-Kadoos platform with a unique product assortment tailored to their internal workflows and systems. Sixty customer care employees now use it daily to send gifts — such as the Jumbo Birth Box — completely in Jumbo’s brand style. Sometimes because something went wrong, but more often simply to celebrate a pleasant customer interaction. The reactions are phenomenal!”

Being flexible and scalable

Building a custom webshop for one of the country’s largest supermarket chains is no small task. How does a small team pull that off?

“With every new development, I keep scalability top of mind. In the start-up phase, you want to stay flexible, use as few software systems as possible, and avoid too many integrations — because you’re still testing what works. At the same time, you need to be ready to scale.”

“Combidesk is the ideal solution for us — it offers a wide range of top-of-the-line software integrations. Thanks to Combidesk, we’re both flexible and scalable.” Wytse Valkema, Founder of Kadoos

“With integrations, you can actually analyze properly”

One of Wytse’s most important integrations is between his webshop — powered by Lightspeed — and his accounting system, Exact Online. Why?

“Without this integration, you’d have to manually transfer the minimal financial data stored in the webshop’s order system to your accounting software. And there, it’s stored per order — not per product.”

Wytse explains that it’s much more useful to analyze your business at the product level — to see exactly which items are selling best and which are underperforming. Without software integrations, those insights simply aren’t possible.

Built for both Sales and Accounting

Wytse also uses an integration between Moneybird and Exact Online. That might sound redundant, since both are accounting systems — but there’s a reason.

“We started with Moneybird. It’s super user-friendly and perfect for start-ups. But as we grew, we ran into limitations, so we switched our bookkeeping to the more advanced Exact Online. The downside is that it’s not as easy to create quotes in Exact. So we, along with our sales agents and resellers, still use Moneybird for quotations. This keeps things separated — and once a customer approves a quote, it’s automatically transferred to Exact Online. Thanks to this integration, Sales has a flexible, user-friendly quoting tool, while our bookkeeping remains accurate and up to date — with zero extra effort.”

The results: cost savings, scalability, and accuracy

“Together, these two integrations cost next to nothing but deliver huge value,” says Wytse. “An accountant easily costs €75 per hour. Everything they have to do manually has to be paid for. A Combidesk integration costs around €15 per month. Without it, an accountant could spend hours — even days — each month on manual work. You do the math. And remember, anything done manually carries a risk of error. Automated software integrations don’t make mistakes.”

“An accountant isn’t scalable either. If we get more orders, she gets more work — but her hours are limited. She also wants weekends off and the occasional vacation. A software integration is different: you set it up once, and it just works — whether it processes 10 or 1,000 quotes, orders, or invoices.”

Wytse expects to keep evolving technologically in the coming years. “As you scale, you start optimizing everything — using more and more apps. We’re currently automating our entire marketing system. What you can do manually as a start-up just isn’t sustainable at scale. I expect we’ll keep expanding — and connecting all our systems together. Hopefully with the help of Combidesk!”

Automating bookkeeping = instant time savings

Connect your webshop (e.g. Shopify, WooCommerce, Lightspeed, CCV Shop, Magento2, Mijnwebwinkel or Plug&Pay) to your accounting software (Moneybird, Exact Online, SnelStart, Twinfield, AFAS, Yuki or e-Boekhouden) and let customers, invoices, and payments flow automatically. Less manual work, fewer mistakes, more clarity — especially when combined with automatic payment matching between Mollie, PayPal, Stripe, Pay.