Rentman invoices booked in AFAS automatically at Expo Flora

The Client

Expo Flora, based in Harmelen in the Netherlands, rents out plants, flowers and furnishings and dresses stands and venues for trade fairs, conferences and festivals, for clients such as RAI Amsterdam and Jaarbeurs Utrecht.

The Situation Before

Expo Flora moved to Rentman to plan and invoice its trade fair projects; before that, it worked with a different application. Its financial administration runs in AFAS. With the move, Rentman was new, and there was no connection whatsoever between Rentman and AFAS yet.

Until that connection existed, everything that had to happen in AFAS was manual work. Every invoice from Rentman was entered into AFAS a second time: the customer, the amounts, the VAT. Tedious, time-consuming work, and retyping goes wrong sooner or later. A typo in an amount, the wrong debtor picked, an invoice that does not quite end up in the right booking: finance had to track down and correct mistakes like these afterwards.

On top of that, payment status was only known in AFAS. Anyone who wanted to see in Rentman whether a customer had paid had to ask around or go and look in AFAS.

Getting the Data Right First

An integration is only as reliable as the data that runs through it. So before going live, we first measured the existing customer data, and that was needed: AFAS is stricter about addresses than Rentman.

• 326 contacts had the Netherlands as their country, while the address was abroad.
• 750 of the 786 relations already existed as debtors in AFAS, with financial settings that must not be overwritten.

In September 2026, 633 contacts were repaired in Rentman. A short data entry guide for Rentman keeps the backlog from building up again.

The Solution: a Layer in Between, with Clear Agreements

We built the integration with Directus as a layer between Rentman and AFAS. Rentman and AFAS do not talk to each other directly: everything passes through an environment of its own, where we first receive the data, check it, and only then pass it on.

That layer makes it possible to agree, per system, who owns which data:

• Rentman leads for the invoice. Customer, lines, amounts and the invoice PDF come from Rentman. As soon as something changes there, Rentman reports it and the integration fetches the full record.
• AFAS leads for the financial data. The collective account, payment terms, VAT liability, credit limit and search name stay with AFAS. On a change in Rentman, only the name, address and contact details are sent.
• The layer in between guards the handover. This is where it is set which data belongs to which system, and where every booking is recorded. That keeps the integration manageable, and easy to extend when Expo Flora’s processes change.

What the Integration Does

• Invoices booked automatically. Every fifteen minutes, released invoices are posted to the AFAS sales journal, with the debtor, revenue and VAT.
• The PDF attached. The invoice PDF from Rentman is attached to the booked invoice in AFAS as a file item.
• Payments back to Rentman. Invoices that AFAS reports as settled are registered as a payment in Rentman. That is also the only thing the integration ever writes to Rentman.
• Existing debtors recognised. Relations AFAS already knows are recognised and updated instead of created again.

Before and After

Before the integration

• Rentman was new and not yet connected to AFAS
• Every invoice was entered into AFAS by hand
• Typos and wrong bookings had to be corrected afterwards
• Payment status was only visible in AFAS
• Customer data in Rentman was not consistent enough for AFAS
• An integration risked duplicate debtors and overwritten financial settings

After the integration

• Released invoices flow from Rentman to AFAS automatically
• The original invoice PDF comes along automatically
• Payments are visible in Rentman
• Existing debtors are recognised instead of duplicated
• AFAS stays the owner of the financial settings

The Result

Rentman and AFAS each do what they are good at, and nobody has to retype data between the two systems any more. Rentman stays the place where projects and invoices are made, AFAS stays the financial administration, and the integration makes sure the information between them is exchanged automatically and under control.

That has removed more than a recurring, error-prone task. The customer data is cleaner, duplicate debtors stay out, and finance has its time back for work that actually matters.

What we did