How Finova eliminated manual finance ops and cut reporting time by 90%

A finance team drowning in their own data

Finova helps small businesses get a handle on their finances. The irony was that internally, their own financial operations were a mess of manual spreadsheets, scheduled exports, and copy-pasted figures. Weekly reports were compiled by hand. Monthly summaries required pulling data from four separate systems. A single number in the wrong cell could cascade into hours of correction work.

"We build tools to help businesses run cleaner operations. Our own internal ops were embarrassingly manual by comparison." — Marcus Hale, Head of Operations, Finova

Where the manual work was hiding

None of this required human judgment. It required human time — and it was consuming too much of it.

What they built with Violet

Finova started with their most painful workflow: the weekly cash flow summary. They connected their accounting software, invoicing platform, and internal dashboard into a single Violet workflow.

trigger:
  type: schedule
  frequency: weekly
  day: friday
  time: "17:00"
actions:
  - type: data.fetch
    sources: ["xero", "stripe", "internal_db"]
    metrics: ["cash_in", "cash_out", "outstanding_invoices"]
  - type: report.generate
    template: "weekly-cashflow"
    data: "{{fetched.metrics}}"
  - type: email.send
    to: ["finance@finova.com", "ops@finova.com"]
    subject: "Weekly cash flow summary — {{date.this_week}}"
    attachment: "{{report.file}}"
  - type: slack.send_message
    channel: "#finance"
    message: "Weekly summary is ready. Outstanding invoices: {{invoices.overdue_count}}"

trigger:
  type: schedule
  frequency: weekly
  day: friday
  time: "17:00"
actions:
  - type: data.fetch
    sources: ["xero", "stripe", "internal_db"]
    metrics: ["cash_in", "cash_out", "outstanding_invoices"]
  - type: report.generate
    template: "weekly-cashflow"
    data: "{{fetched.metrics}}"
  - type: email.send
    to: ["finance@finova.com", "ops@finova.com"]
    subject: "Weekly cash flow summary — {{date.this_week}}"
    attachment: "{{report.file}}"
  - type: slack.send_message
    channel: "#finance"
    message: "Weekly summary is ready. Outstanding invoices: {{invoices.overdue_count}}"

trigger:
  type: schedule
  frequency: weekly
  day: friday
  time: "17:00"
actions:
  - type: data.fetch
    sources: ["xero", "stripe", "internal_db"]
    metrics: ["cash_in", "cash_out", "outstanding_invoices"]
  - type: report.generate
    template: "weekly-cashflow"
    data: "{{fetched.metrics}}"
  - type: email.send
    to: ["finance@finova.com", "ops@finova.com"]
    subject: "Weekly cash flow summary — {{date.this_week}}"
    attachment: "{{report.file}}"
  - type: slack.send_message
    channel: "#finance"
    message: "Weekly summary is ready. Outstanding invoices: {{invoices.overdue_count}}"

From there they automated overdue invoice alerts, monthly P&L consolidation, and expense reconciliation. Within six weeks, nearly every recurring finance operation was running on its own.

The results after 90 days

"The accuracy improvement alone justified the switch. But getting three days back at month-end was the part that genuinely changed how our team operates." — Marcus Hale, Head of Operations, Finova

What they automated next

After finance ops, Finova tackled their customer onboarding flow — a multi-step process involving account setup, document collection, and tool access that previously took up to a week. They reduced it to under 24 hours with a single Violet workflow.

What's next for Finova

Finova is exploring using Violet's AI conditions feature to automatically flag customers showing signs of churn based on product usage data, routing them to their success team before they disengage.

"I used to spend my Fridays buried in spreadsheets. Now I spend them on things that actually move the business forward." — Marcus Hale, Head of Operations, Finova