Africa Business Guides

Our interface is English. Yours is not. That is a staffing question inside the building and a document question outside it — and only one of the two is actually solvable by a vendor.

Mobile money moved faster here than the till software did. What actually reconciles at close of day when a third of takings never touched the cash drawer — and where our honesty about integration begins.

IPRES, CSS, CNPS and a collective agreement that varies by sector. The most useful thing a foreign software vendor can tell you about Francophone payroll is where its competence stops.

The bon de commande, bon de livraison and facture are a three-way match under different names — and a donor auditor who reads only English is a governance risk nobody budgets for.

The CFA franc is pegged to the euro and floats against the dollar. That single fact inverts almost every multi-currency instinct imported from Lagos, Accra or Nairobi — including which exposure is worth tracking.

Bamako is three days from Dakar and the truck is not a rounding error. Corridor distribution, border custody, and why the in-transit window is the number your stock report quietly refuses to show you.

A numbered, nine-class chart of accounts is not a preference in OHADA countries — it is the law. Our ledger has no account numbers at all. Here is why that is the right design, and exactly how the handoff should work.

The CFA franc removes the exchange-rate problem between Dakar, Abidjan and Bamako — and removes nothing else. Why the shared currency makes regional groups underestimate what a border still costs them.

Dakar buyers are usually shopping for three different things at once and calling all of them "ERP". Separate the operations system from the statutory ledger from the payroll bureau, and the shortlist writes itself.

Abidjan runs more multi-site industry than anywhere else in the CFA franc zone, and the shortlist is usually a French-language incumbent against an English-language platform. What that trade actually costs, priced honestly.

Every vendor says they are localized. Almost none are asked which layer they mean. A field guide to the seven layers of localization — and an unusually blunt account of where our own product stops.

When your customer is in Europe, their audit is your operating system. Traceability that survives a client visit, consumption recorded against the job, and the difference between records that satisfy you and records that satisfy them.