Legacy tools couldn’t scale with Limehome’s cross-border growth

Limehome is a fast-growing tech-enabled hospitality company reimagining travel with design accommodations across Europe. Using proprietary technology, Limehome offers comfortable homelike stays with a seamless digital guest experience for business and leisure travelers.

With operations expanding rapidly from Germany and Spain into Italy, Portugal, and beyond, the payments product team had a clear strategic mandate: build a scalable, modern financial infrastructure to support international growth.

But that vision was held back by the operational drag of invoicing. Limehome’s invoicing stack consisted of multiple local, siloed providers that struggled under scale. Each new market meant new workarounds, bugs, and days lost to debugging and manual reconciliation. 

On top of that, fragmentation across vendors meant the business couldn’t get a centralized or holistic view of their e-invoicing performance – each provider reported on different things, limited to their local market, leaving Limehome without a single source of truth to understand easily how they were doing globally.

Especially in highly regulated markets like Italy and Portugal, real-time reporting compliance burdens were high. Internal engineers were constantly pulled into firefighting, some weeks spending up to 70% of their time resolving invoicing issues.

“With our previous provider, it felt like we were part of their e-invoicing solution. We had to debug, check compliance, and even chase down missing invoices ourselves.
—Tobias Laber, Engineering Manager at Limehome

What should have been a background process became a full-time distraction. And as the business pushed into more regulated regions, the team knew the model wouldn’t scale. They needed a single, global platform that could handle invoicing complexity and free them up to work on their own core business.

SOLUTION

One platform, seamless expansion across regulated markets

Limehome adopted Fonoa’s E-Invoicing solution in 2025, going live first in Italy and then in Portugal. Both markets came with tight regulatory requirements – and even tighter internal deadlines.

“Italy was especially urgent. Our previous provider contract was ending and extending it would mean another year of cost and chaos. We launched with Fonoa just in time, with no major issues.
—Tobias Laber

In just 26 working days - and over a week ahead of their deadline - Limehome had Italy E-Invoicing live with Fonoa. The team was impressed not just with the outcome, but with how smooth the process was. Several aspects of the implementation stood out:

• One unified API across countries
• Clear onboarding guides to self-serve part of the process
• Responsive support via Slack during migrations
• Robust validation and error visibility for every invoice

Fonoa makes it really easy to see why something was rejected. Plus, with the extensive validation, rejections don’t happen nearly as often as before.” —Karen Yip, Product Manager (Payments) at Limehome

OUTCOME

Massive reduction in manual errors and near-perfect invoice acceptance rates

With Fonoa, Limehome consolidated its invoicing operations across countries, eliminating the overhead of fragmented systems and unreliable local providers. What once felt like a full-time job became a seamless, standardized flow that scaled with the business.

We used to joke that our team should be renamed to ‘Invoicing.’ With Fonoa, we can finally focus on payments again.
—Tobias Laber

Key outcomes include:

• Over 90% reduction in engineering time with the new standardized invoice flow across markets
• A 99.9% invoice acceptance rate, even in highly regulated countries
• Over 3,600 manual invoice reviews eliminated per year, thanks to proactive validation and automation
• Approximately 1,000 hours saved per year by reducing time spent chasing down invoice issues
• €50K saved per year on internal time spent across accounting, product, engineering, and back office team

And beyond the numbers, the team gained something just as valuable: peace of mind.

Fonoa lets us sleep at night. We don’t have to worry about compliance while we scale.
—Karen Yip

WHAT’S NEXT

Scaling with confidence thanks to faster-than-ever compliance 

With Fonoa, e-invoicing is never a blocker when launching a new market. Expansion related compliance work requires 70% less time for Limehome, with less friction, and minimal engineering lift. What once took months now takes just two weeks.

In fact, by the end of 2025, Limehome will have real-time invoicing compliance live in 5 key markets. 

With each new country, onboarding gets easier. Most of the work is just migration – actual country integration is quick with Fonoa.
— Tobias Laber

Fonoa has become more than a vendor – it’s a scalable infrastructure partner. With invoicing streamlined and compliant by design, Limehome’s payments team can shift its focus back to building value, not putting out fires.

We refer to Fonoa internally as our global invoicing partner. We know they’ll support us as we grow, respond quickly when we need help, and help us stay ahead of complex regulations.
— Karen Yip

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