Manual invoicing created risk and cash flow delays

A global cloud communications provider operating in 70+ countries with 200+ products was preparing for IPO. As part of this effort, a dedicated finance engineering team was formed to modernize the company’s global tax and invoicing infrastructure. The business had outgrown a patchwork of local e-invoicing integrations built over years—leading to operational strain, growing compliance risk, and critical cash flow delays.

We were doing local e-invoicing integrations in Brazil, then Colombia, then Turkey. That was painful. Support was nonexistent, and when you’re stuck, your cash flow is dead for days. We realized: this is not scalable.
— Product Manager, Finance Engineering

In many countries, local teams had to manually re-enter invoices into government systems, often 10 to 15 days after billing. Because customers typically pay only once they receive the invoice, this caused a 20-day delay in collecting payments for a large portion of the business. With 40% of revenue affected, the finance engineering team identified slow invoicing as a key obstacle to the company’s cash flow improvement goals.

We ran the numbers internally and realized: getting invoices out faster is the single biggest thing we could do to unlock working capital.
— Product Manager, Finance Engineering

Meanwhile, tax ID validation was inconsistent, relying on VIES in the EU and manual entry elsewhere. “In some countries, if the tax ID doesn’t match the name or address, your invoice gets rejected—period,” said the team lead. Rejections caused revenue disruption, while also exposing the business to audit fines (for example, fees can be $300 per incorrect record in the US).

Automated invoicing and accurate tax treatment across 70+ countries

After reviewing providers including Sovos, Edicom, Pagero, and Avalara, the team selected Fonoa based on API quality, documentation, flexibility, and platform breadth. They adopted:

Lookup for tax ID validation to clean and verify data at customer creation

Tax Engine for real-time, rules-based rate determination

E-invoicing to enable automated reporting and eliminate manual re-entry

Beyond the platform capabilities, one of the key decision factors for Fonoa was the extensive documentation and implementation support:

No other vendor had anything close to Fonoa’s implementation guides. We were used to doing this with no documentation at all.
— Product Manager, Finance Engineering

Faster cash access and savings drive $45M+ in ROI

Fonoa validated with the customer that they expect $45M+ in net benefits over 3 years, including:

• Days sales outstanding (DSO) reduction from 20 to 5 days, unlocking earlier access to $778M in annual revenue
• $25.6M in opportunity cost savings, by shrinking a $65M monthly cash gap
• $1.5M in VAT exposure avoided, through upstream tax ID validation and better customer classification

At some point you have to ask: do we build a whole new team just to manage this complexity, or do we find a partner? For us, Fonoa was the clear choice.
— Product Manager, Finance Engineering

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