Operating in Kenya

The store manager wants a text before the morning meeting; the finance lead wants email at his desk. My alerts lets each person choose email, push or SMS for stockouts, margin drops, stuck approvals, failed syncs and aging receivables, inside what the workspace allows, with texts that carry counts and never names or amounts.

A supplier raises a price, the till price stays put, and three weeks of sales go out thin while revenue looks healthy. How the margin-drop alert works out each item’s realised margin daily, flags it below a floor or on a sharp drop, and leaves out the sales where a margin would be invented.

On patchy mobile data the reply gets lost more often than the request, so the phone sends again. How a key on every sale, payment and stock movement makes a retry return the first answer instead of recording a second sale, across 172 actions on the app and API.

Either every branch manager is an administrator or every new cashier waits for head office. A delegated admin manages the people of their own branch, grants only access they hold themselves, and cannot touch an Admin, their own account or anyone outside their patch.

An app that works offline also keeps working after an account is suspended, until it next connects. The offline trust window sets how long that can be per role, and a workspace offline policy decides which work may wait in the queue and what the server refuses when it arrives.

A closed month now reopens only on a request with a reason that somebody else approves. Every posting made while it is open again is written down, close steps have owners and due days, and each close stores a checksummed copy of the books that nobody can change.

A board approves the numbers it was sent, and the ledger keeps moving after the meeting. Certified statements freeze a period as a checksummed version, show what has changed since, carry commentary written only from the frozen figures, and go out on a schedule as the board pack.

Click a figure on a financial statement and walk down to the account’s lines, the posting and the invoice, bill or till sale that made it. The walk works because every event now posts once, in balance, as one document that cannot post twice.

Mark the bank, the control accounts and equity as sensitive and any manual journal touching them needs a second person, at any size. Write-offs take two people too. And at year-end, one ZIP holds the ledger, who signed what, every close and reopen, and a checksum for each file.

A credit limit a salesperson can override with a reason is a note, not a control. A workspace credit policy now holds customers who are too far overdue, by segment and per currency, and lifting the hold takes a release that somebody else approves.

A promise made on the phone and kept on a sticky note is one the reminders cannot see. The collections workspace records it, holds the reminders off until its date and marks it kept or broken from the payments, while a disputed invoice stops being chased.

The lorry leaving the yard and the invoice leaving the accounts office are two events. Orders now track pick, pack, ship and deliver on their own, stock still leaves the books at one point only, and contracts bill each milestone exactly once.