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UEMOA · Benin · Burkina Faso · Mali · Niger · Togo · Guinea-Bissau
Goods clear at Cotonou, Lomé, Abidjan or Dakar and then travel for days under a transit regime that suspends duty rather than settling it. For that fortnight you own inventory you cannot see, in a jurisdiction you do not operate in, carrying an obligation that only ends when somebody proves the journey finished. We cannot make any of that faster. We can make it visible, costed and evidenced — and the statutory accounts stay with your expert-comptable, where they belong.
The fortnight nobody models
A consignment moving inland under inter-state transit is not a delivery with a delay in the middle. It is a sequence of custodies, each with its own paperwork, its own cost accruals and its own way of going wrong — and the duty is suspended across the whole of it rather than paid at the start.
01 Cleared for transit at the port
What you are carrying
Duty and VAT are suspended against a guarantee rather than paid. The goods are yours and the obligation is contingent — it becomes real if the transit is never discharged.
The record that would show it
The transit declaration, the guarantee reference, and the port charges already incurred. Usually three documents held by three parties, none of them you.
02 In the port, waiting to move
What you are carrying
Storage and demurrage accrue daily on goods that have not moved. This is the cost that most reliably escapes the landed cost of the consignment, because it arrives as an invoice weeks later with no reference to the shipment.
The record that would show it
A daily charge attributable to one consignment. Almost always reconciled against a statement rather than against the stock it belongs to.
03 On the road, in another country
What you are carrying
You own stock at a location you do not control, in a country where you have no entity. It belongs on your balance sheet and is in nobody's stock count.
The record that would show it
Where it is, what is on it and what it has cost so far. Typically a WhatsApp message from a transporter and a number in somebody's head.
04 At the border
What you are carrying
Formalities, escort and crossing charges, and time. Which framework the movement falls under determines the paperwork — and since January 2025 that is no longer the same answer for every neighbour.
The record that would show it
Each charge, against the consignment that incurred it, with the receipt attached. This is the stage where documentation is most often paid for in cash and least often filed.
05 Arrived and discharged
What you are carrying
Nothing — once discharge is proved. Until it is, the suspended duty is still an open obligation and the guarantee is still committed, whatever the warehouse says.
The record that would show it
Proof the transit was discharged, held against the consignment rather than in a customs agent's file. This is the one document that closes the exposure and the one most often absent.
None of this is unusual and none of it is anybody's mistake. It is what importing into a landlocked market involves. The point is narrower: every line above is a record, and the reason the fortnight is painful is that the records live in five places and the stock lives in none of them.
Five questions worth asking internally before you ask any vendor anything
What is the total value of stock you currently own that is not in any of your locations?
For the last consignment that arrived, what did it cost landed — including demurrage and border charges — and how long after arrival did you know?
Can you produce proof of discharge for every transit closed in the last twelve months, without asking your clearing agent?
When a border charge is paid in cash, where does the receipt go, and is it attached to anything?
If your clearing agent stopped answering the phone tomorrow, which consignments would you be unable to account for?
What this costs today
Every one of these is downstream of the corridor rather than caused by it. The delay is not ours to fix and not yours to have caused — what follows from it is a record-keeping arrangement that works until somebody needs a number.
Stock in transit is on your balance sheet and in nobody's stock take. Most systems model a location you operate; a consignment sitting in a foreign port for eleven days is neither at origin nor at destination, so it gets modelled as a purchase order that has not arrived — which is a document, not an asset.
Freight was quoted, so freight is in the cost. Demurrage, escort charges, border formalities and the second transporter were not quoted, arrive later as separate invoices, and get posted to expense accounts. The consignment is then costed at less than it cost, which quietly prices every sale made from it.
Once goods are in the warehouse the operation treats the shipment as finished. But suspended duty stays suspended until discharge is proved, and the guarantee stays committed. Nothing in the warehouse tells you which transits are still technically open, and the answer usually lives with the clearing agent.
SYSCOHADA fixes the account classes. A system that expects you to invent your own numbering produces statements an OHADA auditor cannot read, and remapping after go-live means restating everything already posted. This is the constraint most foreign software discovers late.
One union, six administrations
What the union genuinely gives you is a single currency, a prescribed chart of accounts and a customs union. What it does not give you is one tax rate, one invoicing obligation or one route to the sea. A system that treats the bloc as one country gets the second half wrong.
| Market | VAT | How goods arrive |
|---|---|---|
| Benin | 18% | Its own port at Cotonou — and a corridor host for cargo moving north. |
| Togo | 18% | Its own port at Lomé, the region's deepest, likewise serving neighbours inland. |
| Burkina Faso | 18% | Landlocked. Goods arrive through Abidjan, Lomé, Cotonou, Tema or Dakar. |
| Mali | 18% | Landlocked. Chiefly Dakar and Abidjan, with the Lomé and Cotonou corridors also in use. |
| Niger | 19% | Landlocked, and the longest hauls in the union. Cotonou, Lomé and Tema. |
| Guinea-Bissau | 19% | Its own coast, and the newest VAT in the union — IVA replaced the old sales tax in January 2025. |
That last line is the one worth reading twice. The union your accountant deals with and the bloc your trucks deal with are no longer the same set of countries — which makes "under which framework did this consignment move, and what proves it" a question with a filing consequence rather than a geography quiz.
The operation, in detail
Each links to a fuller tour. Nothing here talks to a customs administration, files anything with anybody, or produces a statutory account — the boundary is drawn in full below.
Goods in transit modelled as stock rather than as a pending document: quantity, value and where it physically is, visible in the same place as everything on a shelf, so the balance sheet and the stock report agree while the consignment is still on a road.
Freight, duty, demurrage, escort and handling accumulated onto the consignment as each cost arrives, however late, so the unit cost is what the goods actually cost rather than what the freight quote said.
The transit declaration, the guarantee reference, each border receipt and the proof of discharge attached to the shipment they belong to and previewable without downloading — rather than filed by whoever received them.
A supplier invoiced in USD or EUR keeps its original amount and the rate actually applied, alongside the XOF figures. The peg removes euro exposure and does nothing about the rest, so the rate that was used has to survive on the record.
An order, a payment to a transporter or a charge at a border, held with the authority that permitted it — and recorded before the commitment rather than papered afterwards.
Expenditure coded to entity, site and jurisdiction at entry, so a total for one country over one period is a filter rather than an extraction somebody performs from a regional ledger.
Scope, stated plainly
Two of the three things you need in these markets are better bought locally, and one of them should be bought before us. The list below is in the order that matters rather than the order that flatters.
Built, and what we would stand behind
Not built, and not on the roadmap
The pattern across these six markets is that two of the three things you need are better bought locally. That is not modesty — a customer who adopts a platform and then discovers their invoicing route or their statutory presentation does not fit has been badly advised, and remembers who advised them.
How this starts
One number: the value of stock currently in transit, anywhere between a port and a warehouse. Not an estimate from purchase orders — the actual figure, with the consignments listed. If that number arrives in an afternoon you are in better shape than most. If it takes a week and three phone calls, you have found the thing this page is about, and you have found it without buying anything.
Take the last shipment that arrived. Assemble every cost against it — freight, port, demurrage, transit, border, transport, handling — and every document, including proof of discharge. Compare the total to the cost the goods were booked at. The gap is what a fortnight in transit costs you invisibly, per consignment, and it is the whole business case.
If you trade in Benin, settle normalised invoicing first with a provider certified for it — that sits in your revenue path and we are not certified. Keep your expert-comptable and your payroll firm. What is left is the operations layer, and that is the only part we are asking you to consider.
Read before you shortlist
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.
Freight was quoted, so freight is in the cost. Demurrage, escort charges and border formalities were not, arrive later, and get posted to expense — which quietly prices every sale made from the consignment.
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.
Questions we are asked here
No, and be careful with anyone who suggests otherwise. We hold no connection to any customs administration in the union, we lodge nothing, and we have no influence over how long a consignment waits or what it costs to move. What we change is that you know where it is, what it has accumulated in cost, and whether the transit has been discharged — which affects your decisions and your records, not the border.
No. The chart of accounts is prescribed by OHADA law and your expert-comptable owns the presentation, the statements and the filing. What we hold is the transaction detail those statements are built from, coded to accounts your accountant defines, so the year-end is an extraction rather than an archaeology exercise. Any vendor claiming to replace an expert-comptable in an OHADA jurisdiction should be asked which auditor has accepted their output.
Not today, and we would rather say so on the page than in the fifth meeting. The product is English-only. For a finance team that files in French this is a real cost and may reasonably end the conversation. We do not offer a machine-translated interface, because half-translated account labels are worse than an honest English one, and we are not going to promise a localisation date we cannot commit to.
Not through us. Since July 2021 invoices in Benin must be issued through a certified electronic invoicing machine or the e-MECeF platform, with the tax authority validating each one and returning a unique number and QR code before the invoice is valid. That requires an accreditation we do not hold. Buy that from a certified provider first, fit everything else around it, and if that sequencing means you never get to us the advice was still right.
Yes, and the second half is the part that matters. The XOF is pegged to the euro at a fixed rate, so a supplier invoicing in euros carries no real exposure. A supplier invoicing in dollars or yuan does, and the peg covers none of it. The original amount and the rate actually applied stay on the transaction alongside the XOF figures, so a margin can be explained months later rather than recalculated.
Not for accounting or currency. The three withdrew from ECOWAS on 29 January 2025 and remain members of UEMOA and the CFA franc, so the XOF, SYSCOHADA and the union's VAT framework are unaffected. What it does change is that "which framework did this movement fall under" is now a real question with a documentary answer, and the sensible response is to record it per consignment rather than to assume it. We have no view on the politics and no forecast to offer — we are describing why the paperwork matters more than it did.
Possibly, and it depends on one thing rather than on your size. If your goods arrive by corridor and you cannot say what a consignment cost landed until the last invoice turns up, the answer is no — that problem does not get smaller with fewer warehouses, it just gets carried by one person instead of a team. If your imports are occasional and you know your landed cost on arrival, then a good accountant and a spreadsheet are genuinely sufficient and we would rather you kept them.
The value of stock you currently own that is not in any of your locations, with the consignments listed. It takes an afternoon or it takes a week, and which one it takes is the answer to whether this conversation is urgent.