A Warehouse Is a Name and an Address
A warehouse in our system is a name, a code, a free-text address, a manager and a status. It has no country, no currency, no tax registration and no legal entity. For a single-country operation that is exactly right. For a distributor holding stock either side of a border, it means the building has no jurisdiction and the stock in it has no home.
The conclusion first
If all your stock sits in one country, stop here — nothing on this page will ever affect you. If it does not, understand before you buy that a warehouse in this product carries no jurisdiction of any kind, that every warehouse in one organisation is valued in one currency, and that the practical answer is one organisation per country, with the group view assembled outside the system.
Draw the map of a regional distributor on this coast and it does not look like one business. It looks like a corridor: goods landing at Beira or Nacala, a bonded run inland, a depot on the Malawian side, another in Zambia, and a head office that would like one number for all of it.
Now open the warehouse record in our system and see what it can say about any of those buildings. A name. A code. An address, as one line of free text. A manager. A status. That is the entire model.
What a warehouse does not know about itself
The absences are worth listing individually, because each one lands somewhere different.
| What is missing on a warehouse | What that means in practice |
|---|---|
| Country | No report can be grouped by country, and no rule can behave differently in one country from another, because nothing knows which country a building is in. |
| Currency | Stock value is expressed in the organisation's single base currency wherever the goods physically are. |
| Tax registration | There is no per-site registration, so nothing can produce a return, an invoice series or a filing scoped to one site. |
| Legal entity | A warehouse cannot belong to a subsidiary. Ownership of stock resolves to the organisation and nothing finer. |
| Timezone | Every timestamp is recorded in one zone, so a receipt at 08:00 in one country and 08:00 in another are not the same moment on the record. |
| A structured address | The address is one string. There is no city, state or country code to sort, filter or validate on — that structure exists elsewhere in the product, on customer addresses, but not here. |
The building is real, the border is real, and the record has neither.
The currency half, stated exactly
An organisation in this product has one base currency, fixed at setup, and everything in the books is kept in it. Other currencies can be displayed, and a display figure is indicative rather than a second set of records. Documents carry the currency they were raised in and a snapshot of the financial context at the time, which is genuinely useful — but the stock valuation underneath resolves to the base.
That is a defensible design. Multi-book, multi-entity accounting is a different product, and pretending to it with a display conversion would be worse than not doing it. But you should know what it implies before you put three countries in one organisation: your inventory value is a single-currency number, translated at whatever rate applied when the cost was captured, for goods sitting in three monetary systems.
The same pallet, three ways
The last row is the one that decides the architecture. If any of your jurisdictions requires a statement of stock held locally, in local money, the single-organisation shape cannot produce it and no configuration will make it.
The shape that actually works
One organisation per country. It is not elegant and it is not what anybody hopes for, but it is the shape the product supports properly rather than approximately, and the reasons are worth going through because they are not only about currency.
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Each country gets its own base currency and its own books
Which is the only way a local valuation, a local trial balance and a local filing are ever going to be producible.
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Each country gets its own users, roles and approvals
A depot manager in one country does not appear in another country's permission model, which is usually what you wanted anyway and is very hard to arrange inside one organisation.
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Cross-border movements become purchases and sales, not transfers
This is the part people resist and it is the part that is right. A movement across a customs frontier is not the same event as a movement between two of your own racks — it has a declaration, a duty position and a change of legal owner. Modelling it as an internal transfer is the error, not the workaround.
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The group view is assembled outside
A spreadsheet, a reporting tool, or a consolidation your accountant already runs. Each country exports; the group adds. Nothing in the product will do the consolidation for you.
The one thing to decide before go-live
Whether a cross-border movement is a transfer or a sale between two of your organisations. Get this wrong and you will spend a year explaining why your intercompany position does not reconcile. Get it right and everything downstream — duty, margin, local valuation, the auditor's question — has somewhere to live. This decision costs an afternoon before you start and a quarter afterwards.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Multiple warehouses per organisation, each with a name, a code, an address, a manager and an active or inactive status.
- A full location hierarchy inside each warehouse — zone, aisle, bay, shelf, bin — with storage roles.
- Stock held, valued and moved per warehouse and per location, with complete movement history and per-warehouse reporting.
- Transfers between warehouses with dispatch, receipt, partial receipt, shortfall recording and return to source.
- Documents that carry their own currency and a snapshot of the financial context at the time they were raised.
What it does not do
- Any jurisdiction on a warehouse — no country, no tax registration, no legal entity, no timezone.
- A second base currency. One organisation keeps one set of books in one currency, fixed at setup.
- Consolidation across organisations. Each is independent; the group view is assembled outside the product.
- Intercompany transactions between two of your own organisations, matched and eliminated.
- A structured address on a warehouse. It is one line of free text, unlike a customer address, which is fully structured.
Not ours, by choice
- The single-base-currency design is deliberate. An indicative display conversion presented as a second set of books would be a worse product, not a better one.
- One organisation per country is the recommended shape and it is a real cost: separate logins, separate masters, no cross-border stock visibility in one screen.
- Nothing here is specific to Mozambique. It is the arithmetic of any operation whose warehouses are in more than one country.
What is not built for Southern Africa today can still be built for you
Anything described above as not built is a statement about what ships in the standard product today — not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do in Southern Africa. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine exist because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself. The same door is open here. If a revenue authority pipeline, a bank or mobile money feed, a statutory return format, a rule your own operation needs that the standard one does not have, or a link to a system you already run is what stands between you and a decision, tell us and we will scope it as a build — written spec, timeline and price — before you commit to anything.
Tax pipelines and return output
Return output in the shape your revenue authority expects and electronic invoicing against any prescribed interface, with retries, a failure queue and a reconciliation report.
Banks, EFT and card acquirers
Bank statement feeds, EFT and debit-order files and card acquirer settlements pulled into the Payments Register so receipts match invoices without re-keying.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
Payroll and statutory returns
Payroll tax and social security schedules produced in the layout your filing body expects, generated from live payroll records rather than rebuilt each month.
Systems you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. No roadmap slide, and no pretending in a demo that something exists when it does not.
Tell us what you need integratedFive questions for anyone selling you a regional system
Show me stock value for one country only.
A good answer sounds like
A filter or a dimension, applied, on screen.
What it actually means
If it cannot be scoped, no local statement can ever be produced from the system, however good the group view is.
What currency is a warehouse in?
A good answer sounds like
A field on the warehouse, or an honest "the organisation's".
What it actually means
Ours is the organisation's, because a warehouse has no currency. Ask, so that you find out from the vendor rather than from a year-end.
How do you model a movement across a customs frontier?
A good answer sounds like
As a sale and a purchase between entities, with duty and a change of owner.
What it actually means
Anyone who answers "as a transfer" has not thought about it, and you will inherit the consequences.
Can one user see two countries?
A good answer sounds like
A clear architectural answer, not a shrug.
What it actually means
Separate organisations mean separate logins. That is a daily inconvenience worth pricing in now.
Who does the consolidation, and in what?
A good answer sounds like
A named tool or a named person.
What it actually means
If nobody answers this in the sales process, it becomes the finance team's Friday for the life of the system.
Map the corridor before you configure anything
How many organisations, which country holds which master data, and whether a border crossing is a transfer or a sale. An hour on this before go-live saves a year of reconciliation. Tell us the shape of your network.
Map it with usFrequently asked questions
Can I add a country field to a warehouse as a custom field?
Custom fields are available on several modules and are genuinely useful for capturing information, but a custom field is data rather than behaviour — nothing in the valuation, the tax handling or the reporting engine will change because of it. It would let you label a warehouse, not make the system treat it differently.
If I use one organisation per country, can I still transfer stock between them?
Not as a stock transfer, because a transfer is an internal movement within one organisation. Across organisations you raise a sale on one side and a purchase on the other, which is closer to what is actually happening at a border in any case — there is a declaration, a duty position and a change of owner.
Is the base currency really unchangeable?
It is fixed per organisation at setup and everything in the books is kept in it. Treat it as a permanent decision when you create the organisation, not as a setting you can revisit — changing it after there is history is a data problem rather than a configuration one.
