Operating across East Africa

Four East African authorities run four separate schemes against four separate interfaces, and one question separates them: can the sale complete when the authority cannot be reached? We built for one answer, for one country. The consequence we had never written down is that the receipt your customer carries out of the shop does not yet carry the fiscal reference — and a POS filing that failed three times had nowhere to go, which we fixed the day we published this.

A purchase can name the job it is for, and so can a stock issue — costed at the price stamped when it left the store, so a finished job cannot change price later. Two things never reach the job at all, and one of them will surprise you.

We have requests for quotation with real line items and recorded responses. We have no request for proposal, no scoring model, no panel and no sealed bids. Those are not degrees of the same thing, and one of the four cannot be substituted procedurally.

A till session opens with a float, records every drop, and closes with a counted figure and a variance against the person who counted it. All of it is about cash — so on a counter where most customers pay by phone, the strongest control in the shop is watching the smallest pile of money.

Five documents, four handovers. At each one something is carried forward and something is dropped, and the dropped things are invisible on the screen where they happen. This is the map.

Our landed-cost engine spreads a freight bill by value or by quantity. It cannot spread it by weight or volume. For a landlocked buyer whose biggest cost is a lorry charging by the tonne, those were the two bases that would have been right.

You can invoice in another currency, record the rate that applied and take payment in it. You cannot keep a second set of books. The documents are right, the ledger is single-currency, and the difference lands on whoever reconciles.

A help desk fills with personal data faster than any other module, and most of it belongs to people who will never have an account. Our public support path is built well for exactly those people — and the export and erasure tools take a user account as their argument. Also: tickets are on no retention timer and have no deletion path at all.

A quotation commits you to nothing and carries six fields describing tax and currency. A credit note reverses a taxable supply and carries none of them — no tax split, no currency, no line items. What that costs a single-country business is almost nothing; what it costs a group trading across four EAC currencies is an ambiguity on every unapplied credit.

EAC currencies differ in unit value by roughly thirty times, so adding two of them together produces a number that looks reasonable and is wrong by an order of magnitude. Three ways a system can answer "what did we spend", only one of them honest — and a report of ours that adds Ugandan shillings to Kenyan ones and calls a budget breached on the result.

The question buyers normally lead with — are you compliant here — is the one that tells you least in this market. Four that work better, including two where a confident vendor answer should reduce your confidence rather than increase it.

A wrong bank account bounces. A wrong phone number pays someone. Where wages leave for a wallet, in dollars, and are never cashed out, four ordinary payroll assumptions break — and the last moment to catch an error moves to before the transfer.