For financial management specialists and modern accounting firm Valjas, automation was critical. Manual work has become a growing operational bottleneck with customer data spread across multiple systems and no integrations in place.
One customer alone required 300–400 purchase invoices to be manually entered into Netvisor every month, consuming hours of repetitive work and increasing the risk of errors.
To bridge these gaps, Valjas initially turned to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools such as Power Automate and UI Path. But what started as a quick fix soon became a limitation.
Using RPA introduced more problems than it solved:
As transaction volumes grew, the weaknesses of RPA became increasingly clear.
"It's really hard to do big scale stuff with robots. When using robotic process automation like Power Automate and UI Path, robots were crashing and you had to check the result manually," explains Valjas CEO, Pasi Tasanen.
For the Netvisor customer, the impact was especially painful. Each invoice took 3 to 5 minutes to process manually — adding up to hours of repetitive work every month.
Valjas replaced fragile UI-based automation with API-driven integrations built on Frends. The goal was not just to automate internal work, but to create reliable, repeatable automations that could also be offered as services to customers.
With Frends iPaaS, the Netvisor invoice process was fully automated:
The customer delivers an Excel file containing 300–400 invoices
Frends automatically processes the data
Purchase invoices are inserted into Netvisor via API
The process runs fully in the background on a schedule — daily, nightly, or as needed
Once the foundation was in place, Valjas expanded automation to other high-impact use cases, including:
Processing thousands of payments for a mining operations customer
Integrations with the tax office to collect letters and inquiries
A Stripe-to-Netvisor integration
Automated task creation in project management systems for better follow-up
Customer onboarding automation
Customer onboarding is another area where Valjas is using Frends to remove manual handovers between systems.
For an accounting firm, onboarding a new customer involves much more than signing a contract. Customer information needs to be collected, accounting environments configured, integrations connected, responsibilities assigned and internal teams given the information they need to start working.
Valjas has been building a more automated onboarding process around Frends. Instead of repeatedly transferring the same information manually between systems, structured customer information can move through an automated workflow. The process can include:
Collecting structured customer and business information
Transferring information from the sales process into onboarding
Creating and configuring the customer's Netvisor environment
Creating internal onboarding tasks and checklists automatically
Providing the accounting team with a structured summary of the customer's business model and accounting requirements
This creates a standardized onboarding process while still allowing Valjas's specialists to focus on decisions that require professional judgement.
It also demonstrates one of the key advantages of using Frends as an integration platform: individual automations can gradually be connected into end-to-end business processes.
Rather than automating one task at a time, Valjas can orchestrate the flow of information from sales and onboarding all the way to bookkeeping, reporting and ongoing customer service.
20+ hours saved every month
By automating invoice entry, Valjas eliminated hours of manual work for their customer every month — work that previously required constant attention.
"Customers are saving hours per month. With Frends, it's running in the background so you can automate it and schedule it so it runs every day, every morning, every night," says Tasanen.
Higher accuracy and reliability
Unlike robots that can silently fail or produce incorrect results, API-based automation provides deterministic outcomes and clear visibility.
"With the API is much more scalable and accurate. Then, you also have the log which is much harder to read [with robots]."
For Tasanen’s team, being able to ensure processes would complete successfully or return a clear error along with logs that pinpoint exactly which record needs attention was game-changing.
Eliminated human errors
Manual handling of invoices and payments always carries risk. API automation removes that uncertainty.
"Human can make errors really easily with the payment ending up going to somebody else, for example. Through an API there is no mistake because it does only what you tell it to."
New revenue through automation-as-a-service
Automation was never only about internal efficiency. From the start, the goal was to build integrations Valjas could sell. The Stripe-to-Netvisor integration is the clearest example: it removes hours of monthly manual work for the customer, and it is billed as a paid integration service rather than absorbed as overhead.
Better visibility and quality control
Tax office integrations now automatically create tasks in Valjas’s project management system, ensuring nothing is missed and team leaders have full visibility.
"Sometimes some team members could forget to answer some inquiry and now we can see everything. Team leaders have the visibility of the tasks we need to complete with much more quality."
The same principle can be applied throughout Valjas's operations: when something happens in one system, Frends can ensure that the appropriate action is triggered in another.
Valjas plans to continue expanding its integration services by:
Creating reusable, scalable integrations for multiple customers
Supporting NetSuite implementations
Automating internal reporting and data collection
Helping customers with complex software landscapes reduce manual work
"We needed a platform like this to help us broaden our services. The plan is to build business on top of Frends and scale up to other customers."
Automated 400 invoices per month
Eliminated 20+ hours of manual work monthly
Replaced unstable RPA with reliable API-based automation
Reduced human errors in financial processes
Created new revenue streams through integration services
Improved visibility and quality control across operations
Customer onboarding increasingly automated across multiple systems
New recurring revenue opportunities through integration services