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For Senegal

The third purchase — the one most Dakar buyers underestimate

Statutory accounts belong with your expert-comptable. Payroll belongs with a Senegalese specialist. What is left is the operations layer — what you hold, what you committed to, what it cost and who approved it — and that is the whole of what we sell.

The order
The expert-comptable, then the payroll specialist, then us. That order is correct and we are not competing with either. The third purchase is what is left when both have done their jobs — and a thing defined by subtraction is easy not to notice you need.
Interface language
English only, with no French. In Dakar this is the row most likely to end the conversation, so it is in the first screen rather than the last answer. Test it with your storekeepers, not your finance lead.
Statutory and payroll
Neither is ours. No OHADA statutory accounts, no DGID filing, and no IPRES, CSS or IR calculation. Employee records, attendance, leave and cost allocation are.
Several countries, one head office
Each country its own locations, currency behaviour and approval chain, under one view. Amounts in different currencies are never converted and added together — you scope a report to one currency or see the largest slice with the rest disclosed.

The order a Dakar buyer actually buys in

Three purchases. Everybody budgets for two of them.

A Dakar finance director buys in a settled order, and the order is right. The problem is that the third purchase is defined by subtraction — it is whatever is left once the first two have done their jobs properly — and a thing defined by subtraction is very easy not to notice you need until an operation has grown past the point where one person can hold it.

01

The expert-comptable

Statutory accounts in the OHADA chart, the presentation, the filings, and professional responsibility for all of it.

What it leaves for somebody else They can only work from what you hand them. Nothing in that engagement produces the underlying record; it consumes one.

02

The payroll specialist

Senegalese payroll properly — IPRES, CSS, IR — calculated, declared and filed by somebody who does it every month.

What it leaves for somebody else Payroll knows what people cost. It does not know which programme, site or contract that cost belongs to, and that allocation is not a payroll question.

03

The operations layer

What you hold, where it is, what you committed to, what it actually cost and who approved it — captured as the work happens rather than reconstructed afterwards.

What it leaves for somebody else Nothing, and that is the point. This is the remainder, and it is the whole of what we sell.

Two honest consequences of that ordering, and both cost us business. If you have not made the first two purchases, make them before you talk to us — an operations layer feeding a bookkeeping arrangement nobody owns produces tidy records and an unfiled year. And if one person can still hold the whole operation in their head, the third purchase is premature; come back when the second site opens. We would rather write both sentences here than sell a licence somebody abandons in month four.

Operations in Senegal

Four questions, and none of them is answered by your accounting package.

The hero gives away the whole commercial position: the first two purchases are the expert-comptable and the payroll specialist, and we are the third. The reason the third one gets underestimated is that its questions sound like accounting questions and are not. What do you hold, where is it, what did you commit to, what did it really cost and who approved it — an accounting package answers the last of those after the fact and none of the first four at all.

Inventory

Corridor stock that is somewhere for a week

Goods moving from Dakar to Bamako or into the interior are in a state most systems have no word for. A transfer is confirmed on arrival rather than on despatch, so the week in between is visible rather than being a discrepancy reconciled later.

Stock transfers

Transfers with custody and variance on both ends

Who released it, who received it, what arrived and what the difference was worth. A transfer that departs full and arrives approximate is the most common untracked loss in the region, and it is only untracked because nobody made receipt an event.

Procurement

A commitment recorded when it is made

Requisition, refusing threshold, RFQ comparison with the losing quotes kept, purchase order and three-way match. The gap between committing money and the invoice arriving is where a programme budget quietly goes.

Project cost

Programme cost recorded as it happens

Site, programme, funder and cost centre captured at entry rather than allocated at reporting time, so a burn rate is a filter and a donor report is an export rather than a reconstruction.

Assets

Custody on everything that leaves Dakar

Named custodian, location, condition at each hand-off, movement history and documents attached. For a Dakar head office running operations in three countries, this is the register that answers the question an ownership list cannot.

Offline operations

Capture at sites the network does not reach

Stock transfers, inventory check-out and check-in, and asset movements recorded offline on mobile and synced on return — the same design that runs upcountry East Africa, applied to the same problem.

On running Mali and Guinea from Dakar, which is the most common shape here: each country is its own set of locations, its own currency behaviour and its own approval chain, under one head office view. Amounts in different currencies are never converted and added together in a report — you scope the report to a currency or you see the largest slice with the rest disclosed, because a single blended figure would be a number that is true of nothing.

Recognisable, we hope

Four questions your accountant cannot answer for you

Three purchases hiding in one word

A statutory ledger, a payroll engine and an operations system are entirely different products, and "un ERP" is used for all three. Buying the wrong one is the most common expensive mistake in this market.

Stock that lives on a road for a week

Cargo landing in Dakar for Bamako is neither in your warehouse nor at your customer for several days. Ask on a Tuesday how much you own in transit and you get a pause, a phone call and an estimate.

An accountant doing archaeology

Most of what an expert-comptable bills a smaller business for is establishing what happened — which receipt, whose approval, why the stock moved. That is not accounting, and you are paying professional rates for it.

Regional operations run as one country

The shared CFA franc removes the exchange rate between member states and nothing else. A combined figure across two tax jurisdictions adds up perfectly and means nothing administratively.

Scope in Senegal — we are the third purchase, and here is exactly what the third purchase is

Running in the product today

  • Corridor stock with in-transit visible, transfers confirmed on arrival rather than on despatch.
  • Transfers with custody at both ends and valued variance on receipt.
  • Procurement with refusing thresholds, RFQ comparison with losing quotes retained, purchase orders and three-way matching.
  • Programme, funder, site and cost centre coded at entry, so burn rates and donor reporting are filters rather than reconstructions.
  • Asset registers with named custody, movement history and condition on hand-off, across several countries under one head office view.
  • Offline capture for four field operations — stock transfers, inventory check-out and check-in, and asset movements — at sites the network does not reach.
  • XOF as your base currency, with other currencies held separately and never silently converted into a single blended total.

Absences — on the roadmap, and commissionable now

  • No French interface. English only, and documents are produced in English. In Dakar this is the row most likely to end the conversation, and we raise it in the first call rather than the third month.
  • No Senegalese statutory payroll. The maintained statutory engine covers Kenya only. Employee records, attendance, leave and cost allocation are real; IPRES, CSS and IR calculation is not.
  • No DGID transmission or Senegalese e-invoicing connection. Our transmission layer is Kenya's eTIMS and it is Kenya-only.
  • No bank statement reconciliation and no mobile money integration — M-Pesa exists and is Kenya-only, so Wave and Orange Money receipts are recorded by you rather than matched automatically.

What we would decline, and would rather say now

  • We will not produce OHADA statutory accounts. The local chart, the statutory presentation and the filing belong with your expert-comptable, who is licensed for it and carries the liability. We give them an operational record that stands up; we do not replace them, and a vendor claiming to is selling a professional service inside a software licence.
  • We will not tell a small Dakar business to buy this. If one person can still hold the whole operation in their head, the third purchase is premature and the honest answer is to come back when it is not. We would rather say that here than sell a licence somebody abandons in month four.

The middle column is absences rather than positions, and each is commissionable now on a written specification, a timeline and a price agreed before any money moves — and for French we would show you a customer-facing document before you signed anything. Kenya is the evidence that this is a real offer rather than a sales line: its eTIMS transmission and its statutory payroll engine were both built exactly that way, by clients who needed them and paid for them.

Take the language row first and the rest afterwards. If your storekeepers and site supervisors work in French, a Senegalese vendor already shipping it starts where we would be finishing, and that is the rational purchase — the rest of this page only matters once that question has an answer you can live with.

How this starts

Three moves, once the first two purchases are in place

01

Separate the three purchases

Statutory ledger, payroll, operations. Decide which you actually need before any demo. Most organizations need two of the three and almost nobody needs all three from one vendor.

02

Settle the language question honestly

Our interface is English and prints in English. Test it at your least-trained site, not at head office, and ask two real customers how an English invoice would land. If it fails, buy locally and we will say so.

03

Write the handoff to your expert-comptable

What they receive, in what form, on what date — one page, agreed before go-live. It is the single highest-return hour of the whole implementation.

Read before you shortlist

Guides for this market

Africa Business Guides 13 min

ERP Software in Senegal: A Practical Buyer's Guide (2026)

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.

Read
Africa Business Guides 12 min

OHADA, SYSCOHADA & Your Operations System: Where the Line Falls

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.

Read
Africa Business Guides 12 min

One Currency, Eight Tax Authorities: Operations Across the XOF Zone

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.

Read
Assets & Equipment 12 min

One Truck, Four Assets

Operations registers the truck once. Your expert-comptable registers it as four things with four different lives, because under the harmonised plan you do not choose your asset classes and a significant machine is not one depreciable object. The two documents agree on the total and disagree on how many things exist — and nothing tells you, ever.

Read
Implementation & Rollout 13 min

Buying Operations Software in the Franc Zone Interior: A Straight Guide

Six markets, one currency, and three purchases that get bundled into one conversation. Two of the three are better bought locally, and one of them should be bought before us.

Read
Inventory Insights 11 min

The Stock You Own and Cannot See

Goods in transit are on your balance sheet and in nobody's stock count. Most systems model a location you operate, so a consignment sitting in a foreign port for eleven days becomes a purchase order — which is a document, not an asset.

Read

Questions we are asked in Dakar

Straight answers, and what a French interface would take

Do you produce OHADA statutory accounts?

No. Our chart of accounts has no account-number field at all — accounts carry a name, a description and a debit or credit nature, and there are fourteen seeded by default. A numbered SYSCOHADA plan cannot be entered even manually, so a statutory presentation is impossible by construction. That is a deliberate design decision rather than an unbuilt feature. Your statutory books belong with a Senegalese accounting package or your expert-comptable; we hold the governed operational records they work from. This one is a boundary rather than a backlog — it does not change with a commissioned build, and it is a deliberate design decision rather than a gap. The SYSCOHADA plan is prescribed by law, and your expert-comptable owns the presentation and signs it. What we hold is the costed operational detail those accounts are assembled from, which is the half that is genuinely hard to reconstruct after the fact.

Is the interface available in French?

No. The interface is English only, there are no translation files in the product, and there is no setting waiting to be enabled — so this is not a roadmap answer dressed up as a limitation. Printed documents including invoices, purchase orders and delivery notes are produced in English. For many Senegalese businesses this is decisive, and we raise it in the first call rather than the third month. The honest test is to take a demo to your least-trained site and watch someone complete a real task unaided. That is on the roadmap rather than a boundary, and it is commissionable now. Interface text and document templates in French is scoped, priceable work rather than a permanent limit. Kenya's eTIMS transmission and its maintained statutory payroll engine both exist because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them — neither arrived on a roadmap by itself. The honest caveat: a vendor already shipping the language starts where we would be finishing, so if it is your first requirement rather than your third, buying locally is the rational move and we would rather write that sentence than lose your third month to it.

Does it handle CFA francs and Senegalese VAT?

Yes, both as built-in presets. The CFA franc is resolved automatically as the base currency from the organization's country, and everything is stored, invoiced, printed and reported in it — with no exchange rate anywhere inside the monetary union. A Senegalese value added tax rate ships as a maintained preset with net, tax and gross separated line by line on purchases as well as sales. Additional tax lines are configurable with their own rates and effective dates, but configured lines are yours to keep current. Confirm current rates with the DGID or your adviser.

Do you file anything with the DGID?

Nothing. We have no integration with the DGID and submit nothing on your behalf. Our only fiscal electronic invoicing integration anywhere is Kenya's eTIMS and it is Kenya-specific and not portable. Requirements in this region have been evolving, so confirm the current position, scope and timing with the DGID or your adviser rather than relying on any vendor's summary — and where an obligation applies to you, you will need a compliant solution from someone else alongside us. That is on the roadmap rather than a boundary, and it is commissionable now. A pipeline to a published DGID interface, with retries and a reconciliation report, is ordinary integration work. Kenya's eTIMS transmission and its maintained statutory payroll engine both exist because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them — neither arrived on a roadmap by itself. If this is the thing standing between you and a decision, say so and we will come back with a written specification, a timeline and a price before you commit to anything. What we will not do is print a date nobody has paid for.

Can you run Senegalese payroll?

Not as turnkey statutory payroll. IPRES, CSS, the income tax scale and sector collective agreements are not maintained calculations in our product — Kenya is our only market where statutory payroll works that way, because it is where we maintain the rules and carry the consequences. What does work is employee records, contracts, leave with balances, attendance, and posting payroll cost into projects and cost centres. The computation and declarations belong with a Senegalese payroll provider or your expert-comptable.

We run operations in Mali and Guinea from Dakar. Does that work?

The operational layer travels well, and the shared currency removes exchange rates between monetary union members entirely — no revaluation of intercompany balances and no translation adjustment on consolidation. What must be right is structure: country as a first-class attribute on every transaction, tax configured per country rather than copied because the currency matches, in-transit locations for stock on the corridor, and statutory books kept per entity locally. Confirm your entity structure with your adviser before configuring anything.

Should a small Dakar business buy this?

Often not, and we will tell you so. If your main need is statutory accounts and payroll and your operations are simple — one location, modest stock, a handful of suppliers — a local accounting package plus a payroll provider is the better purchase and an operations layer would be premature. We earn our place when the operational side carries the complexity: stock across locations or borders, procurement needing approval chains, assets to track, projects to cost, or funders who audit you.

Twenty minutes, and a straight answer

Tell us your working language, who keeps your books and whether you operate outside Senegal. That is usually enough for us to say yes or to point you at a local vendor.