The kwacha moved. Your price list did not.

No. Nothing is transmitted to the Zambia Revenue Authority from our system today, and our only fiscal e-invoicing integration anywhere is Kenya's eTIMS, which is Kenya-specific and not portable. What we hold is the record a return is built from — sales and purchases with net, tax and gross separated line by line, and source documents attached to the transaction. Scope, thresholds and timing for electronic invoicing have moved more than once here, so confirm your current obligation with ZRA or your tax adviser rather than with any vendor, and plan for an accredited route alongside us where one applies. That is on the roadmap rather than a boundary, and it is commissionable now. Transmission to the ZRA interface with retries, a failure queue and a daily report of sales carrying no fiscal reference is an ordinary integration. 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.

It depends on what you actually price and settle in, and it is a decision worth making deliberately rather than accepting a default. The base currency is locked per organization, and everything is stored, invoiced, printed and reported in it. Businesses that buy in dollars but sell domestically in kwacha almost always want kwacha as the base with dollar purchases recorded at the rate applied. Businesses that price contracts in dollars sometimes want the reverse. There is an optional organization-wide display currency for dashboards, but it is indicative only and never appears on an invoice, statement, receipt or export.

Freight, duty, clearing, handling and inland transport are recorded as landed-cost components on the purchase and allocated across the receipt by value or by quantity, so goods enter stock at their real cost and that cost flows into the weighted average your margins use. This is the single strongest reason to run a system at all on a long import corridor: pricing off the supplier invoice line loses money invisibly, month after month, until somebody finally reconciles a margin and finds the gap.

Not as statutory payroll. Employee records, contracts, compensation, leave with balances, attendance and payroll cost allocation to projects and cost centres all work and are used daily. The national calculation — income tax bands, NAPSA contributions, statutory return formats — is maintained for Kenya only, because that is where we keep the rules current and carry the consequences of getting them wrong. In Zambia the arrangement that works is a local payroll bureau doing the computation and filing, with the employee and cost side held here.

They are reconciled against, not integrated with. There is no live connection to either; M-Pesa in Kenya is our only mobile money integration anywhere. In practice the payment is recorded against the invoice when it is received, the provider statement is imported, and the two are matched on a regular rhythm. That works, and a great many businesses run exactly this way — it is simply a different thing from a live feed, and you should know which one you are buying.

That is the right question to press every vendor on, and it should be tested at the site rather than in a boardroom. Be exact about the boundary when you test: a registered device queues four operations locally — stock transfers, inventory check-out and check-in, and asset movements — syncs when the connection returns, and duplicate-safe sync means a retried operation does not create a second record. Counting and receiving against a purchase order need a connection. A storekeeper can be given genuinely restricted access, which is a control as much as a convenience. Judge us at the worst-connected store you run, and judge us on those four rather than on the word offline.

When the complexity is in accounting and payroll rather than in operations. If you run one location, hold modest stock, import rarely and mostly need statutory books and pay runs, a local accounting package plus a payroll bureau is the better purchase and an operations layer would be premature. We earn our place when goods move between locations, when imports carry real landed cost, when procurement needs approvals that actually block, or when a funder audits how you spent their money.