Customer
Alva Labs
“It’s like having a whole finance team. But it’s agents doing the work for me.”
Measured outcomes
Systems
Many → one
Separate accounting systems per entity, plus a subscription tool, replaced by a single ledger.
Monthly report
Days → seconds
An agent with read access to Light and the CRM consolidates the board report at the push of a button.
Month-end close
Day 5 → day 1
From five-day closes and lost weekends to targeting a same-day close.
Alva Labs builds an AI-native hiring system so companies decide on evidence, not gut feel. Their finance team wanted to run the same way.
“At Alva Labs we’re an AI-native company, and every department is responsible for adopting the new way of working,” says Finance Manager Thobias Cogrell. “This was my way to do it for finance.”
With three entities across Sweden, Norway, and the UK, each on its own accounting system, the reality before Light was heavy, manual, and slow.
The problem: three countries. Three systems. One very long month-end.
Thobias managed finance across three legal entities, each running its own local accounting system. Every month-end meant the same sequence: export from Sweden, Norway, and the UK, map each file into a common format, reconcile the differences, and produce something that could go to the board.
The goal was to close within five days. Some months that meant working weekends. The frustration was not that the work was hard. It was that it was easy, repetitive, and consuming the time Thobias needed for everything else.
Day-to-day bookkeeping also sat with an external consultant, so Thobias didn’t own the transactions and couldn’t move at the business’s speed.
The legacy way: export, map, hope
“Before Light we had multiple entities, and each month closing the books was a hassle,” Thobias explains. “A lot of data consolidation from one system to another. You export the file from one accounting system and another, run an Excel formula to make sure everything is mapped the right way, and hope it makes sense in the final output.”
Day-to-day bookkeeping sat with an external consultant, a bottleneck. “They did a great job, but if I wanted something now, I didn’t own the transaction.” The goal was to close by day five; the reality was often weekends. “I’ve had to work weekends to make sure we had it ready for Monday. It’s a time-requiring process.”
The frustration was structural. “One entity says X balance, another says Y, and it doesn’t add up, so you deep-dive to see why there’s a delta between three systems that should talk to each other, but don’t. That’s the legacy way of working, and it creates the headache instead of solving it.”
Finding an AI-native system
“Like everyone in finance, I realised how many hours went to manual work,” Thobias says. “I saw AI-native companies solving problems in other areas and thought there must be something for finance. So I asked ChatGPT which was the most AI-native, automated accounting system out there, ran a comparison, and ended up with Light.”
The first demo landed hard. “The thing that blew my mind was the consolidation between multiple entities, and how easy it was. No more spreadsheets from the UK and Norway to Sweden, but one system doing it all.” The decision was easy: “Light gave us everything we needed in one system. From a cost perspective it made sense, and from time spent per close it made sense.”
Not a legacy ERP
“We’re a fast-growing company that needs things implemented fast,” Thobias says. “Multiple local accounting systems don’t scale with our growth, and a big legacy ERP doesn’t either. We need the accounting system to be agile and scale the way we work, not to design our company around how the big ERPs are designed. That’s the bottleneck with those systems.”
What Alva Labs runs on Light
- Consolidation and intercompany elimination across the Swedish, Norwegian, and UK entities on one ledger.
- The monthly board report built by a cloud agent that reads Light and the CRM. One button, done in seconds.
- Revenue recognition and deferred revenue automated: templates set once at onboarding, then applied to every invoice.
- Budget versus actuals tracked by the agent, instantly seeing where and why the company overspent.
- Up-to-date books every day, instead of finance built around a single monthly close.
- Expense management moving into Slack for the wider organisation.
Once set up, it runs itself
Alva Labs sells 12-month-plus SaaS contracts. Recognising that revenue correctly, month by month over the contract period, is non-negotiable. Before Light, that required manual attention every month. Now, Thobias sets up the templates once during onboarding. When an invoice is created, Light reads the contract period from the invoice line and recognises revenue automatically across the right months.
The two things that matter most in a finance function are accuracy and speed, in that order. Automated revenue recognition removes the human error risk from the most compliance-critical part of the job. It simply does not get missed.
One entity’s worth of headache
“It’s a lot less headache. Even though we’re three entities, it’s like I’m running a finance department for one entity, and every finance person knows the benefit of that.”
The agent changed the work itself. “It’s like having a team of employees, but it’s actually just agents doing the repetitive and manual work for me, and the structured analysis too. It enables me to do so much more than crunching numbers. I can do the strategic work, which is every finance department’s goal.”
Thobias Cogrell · Finance Manager, Alva Labs
“Everything is about speed and accuracy, and that’s why I bought Light. Having everything under one roof is such a powerful tool.”
Thobias CogrellFinance Manager, Alva Labs
Run finance on evidence, not effort
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