Operating in Kenya

A statutory e-invoicing interface answers every request with the same four fields, and one of them decides everything. The connector puts the authority's own code in front of you rather than translating it away.

A revenue authority identifies your invoice by a number you choose. Three kinds of document were each choosing from their own sequence — two documents claiming one filing, invisible from inside.

The password on an M-Pesa request is not stored anywhere. It is built fresh for every call out of three pieces — one of which is the current time — which makes your server clock part of getting paid.

The response to a payment request is two identifiers and a suggestion to ask the customer for their PIN. Everything that matters arrives later, from a party that signs nothing.

Three SMS providers, one missing sender name, three behaviours: one omits the field, one substitutes a default, one refuses to send. A connector that assumed any of them would break on the other two.

A text message has no single moment of success. It is accepted, queued, handed to a network, delivered, perhaps read — and an API that answers immediately can only tell you about the first.

WhatsApp will not let a business send a message it has not read first. Every business-initiated notification uses wording approved by Meta in advance — which shapes everything about how the connector works.

One says what left the shelf. The other says who received it and whether they should have. Our batch trace answers the first properly — every movement, every location still holding it, quantities in, out and remaining. There is no patient anywhere in the product, so it stops at the door, and that is a boundary we intend to keep.

Splitting a purchase to stay under a tender ceiling is the pattern every auditor looks for first. Our product will not spot it, and the reason is structural rather than a missing report: a procurement request in our system carries no money at all, and its department is free text. There is nothing at the moment of the split to compare against a threshold.

An auditor asks to see one that was refused. Our product answers that well in the two places it records decisions properly — item master changes and deletions, both with segregation of duties. In the generic workflow engine, which has by far the richer approval model, the approver receives a task whose four states do not include yes or no.

Every public tender has an integration line and it is usually answered with a yes. Ours: tax filing to KRA runs automatically against real endpoints, queued so a sale is never blocked, with the receipt number stored on the record. IFMIS, nothing at all. The difference is structural rather than effort, and knowing why will help you write a better specification.

Almost every prequalified supplier list has the same defect: nothing removes anyone. Ours has a shelf life — a validity period you set, a date stamped at approval, and a job that runs at six every morning, expires the qualification and deactivates the supplier so they drop out of the selectable list. Here is the whole pipeline, and the five things it does not do.