Operating in North Africa

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.

A donor file in English, an approval chain that speaks Arabic or French, and a supplier invoice in neither. Governance across a language boundary, and what breaks when evidence has to be translated after the fact.

Moroccan buyers are usually choosing between a French-language local incumbent and an English-language international product, and the deciding question is rarely features. Who reads the screen, who reads the contract, and who answers the phone.

A city of twenty-odd million where a delivery van covers a fraction of the ground it would anywhere else, and the working week ends on a different day. Density, custody and the routing of stock through a megacity.

The Egyptian pound and the Moroccan dirham are both "local currency" and almost nothing else about them is alike. Why one demands rate discipline per transaction and the other demands discipline about the euro.

Egypt's electronic invoicing regime pairs a certified filing provider with your operations system. How that split works in practice, what each side owns, and what to demand from whoever handles the submission.

In Egypt "is it localized?" has five different answers depending on which layer you mean — language, currency, tax rate, e-invoicing, working week. A layer-by-layer buyer's guide, including the one where we tell you to look elsewhere.

Our turnover report counts consumption from the till as well as from issues, rolls balances back through the period's own movements, and works over any dates. Then it hands you one figure for the entire company and stops.

A count plan asks how often you intend to count, requires an answer, validates it and stores it. Nothing then happens on that rhythm — no session is ever raised. The field is not missing, which is what makes it dangerous: a plan reading "monthly" looks exactly like a control that is running. It is the third inert setting we have found in our own product.

Three invoices below the threshold settled in one transfer are above it. Where withholding is decided at invoice entry the system is wrong in both directions at once, and the certificate that makes the credit claimable arrives later still.

A fixed sum per document, and a turnover tax with a floor derived from floor area. Neither is a percentage of a line, both are real obligations — how to record each one today, and the fixed-charge rate types we can add to your workspace.

Maintenance is recorded here as a movement: what happened, to which asset, on what date, by whom — a real history you can read. Preventive schedules that generate the next visit from that history are the layer above, and one we can add for you.

A discount at this till is four columns: the sale, the line, a free-text description and an amount. No approver, no reason code, no limit and no user. It is a record of what happened, not a control over whether it should have.

This payroll engine computes statutory deductions correctly and cannot store the reference numbers those deductions are filed under. Two such columns exist in our database and are read by nothing — not a form, not a payslip, not an export.

There is a figure here for work that has been done, is billable, and has not been invoiced. It is the closest thing this product has to work in progress — and the rate it uses can be set per entry, which is exactly what the cost side cannot do.

A customer balance field is written only when somebody creates or edits the customer by hand. No invoice, payment or credit note touches it. And it is the opening balance of every statement and the base of every credit exposure.

Our quote comparison scores price, delivery time and a vendor rating, with weights that must sum to one. Two of the three are real. The third is a field nothing fills in, and when it is empty the score uses 3.5.

Egypt closes 30 June, Japan and India 31 March, Ethiopia on a date that is not the first of any Gregorian month. Our ledger turns out to be immune because it never modelled a year at all — and the damage is done by four convenience buttons and a handful of defaults that all assume 1 January.

A support promise measured in working hours has to know when you work in both directions — counting down, and giving time back after a pause. Ours knew in one, and the missing half put a Friday deadline at eleven at night.

Ask every vendor to compute 1,000 dinars plus FODEC plus VAT and show you the split. We publish what ours does, which is wrong, which is the only reason the question is fair.