Before you click anything: the two hours that decide how this goes
The quick-start above gets you transacting. This section is about getting you transacting on data you can trust, which is a different and more important thing. Businesses that struggle with a new system almost never struggle with the software. They struggle because they loaded approximate data at the start and then spent three months arguing with reports built on it.
Four things are worth preparing before you configure anything, ideally on paper or in a spreadsheet:
- Your product list, with cost price as well as selling price. Cost price is the one people skip, and without it every margin, profit and valuation figure the system produces is meaningless. If you genuinely do not know the cost of an item, use your most recent purchase price and mark it to be corrected — a flagged estimate is far better than a confident wrong number.
- An opening stock count. A real count, done on a specific day, ideally on a Sunday evening or before opening. Not last month's figure adjusted from memory.
- Who owes you, and who you owe. Customer balances and supplier balances as at your chosen start date, with the invoice each amount relates to where you have it.
- Your staff list with roles. Who is allowed to give a discount, who can see cost prices, who can void a sale, who can access reports. Decide this before people log in, because retrofitting permissions after everyone has been an administrator for a fortnight is unpleasant.
Preparing this is the bulk of the work and it is work you would have to do for any vendor. If it feels tedious, that is a signal about the state of your current records rather than about the software.
Pick a start date, and make it a real boundary
Choose a date — the first of a month is easiest for reporting — and treat it as a hard line. Everything before it stays in your old records. Everything after it goes in the system. Do not attempt to back-load six months of history "for continuity"; it takes days, it introduces errors you will never fully find, and nobody ever looks at it.
What you carry across the line is a position, not a history: stock on hand, balances owed, open orders, and active contracts or leases. That is all a system needs to start telling the truth.
A realistic ten-day plan
- Days 1–2 — Prepare data. The four items above. This is the longest step and the one people underestimate by roughly a factor of three.
- Day 3 — Configure the business. Business name and TIN, address, logo, currency, tax settings, payment methods including your M-Pesa, Tigo Pesa and Airtel Money details, and your bank accounts.
- Day 4 — Load products and opening stock. For anything beyond a few dozen lines, send us the spreadsheet — import is part of onboarding and is included in your plan at no cost.
- Day 5 — Set up users and permissions, from the roles you decided on day 1. One account per person, never a shared login.
- Day 6 — Configure TRA VFD if it applies to you. You need your certificate and its password from TRA. Test the connection and put through a single test transaction before you rely on it. Use the free EFD/VFD eligibility checker if you are unsure whether it applies, and the TRA VFD compliance guide for the detail.
- Day 7 — Train the people who will use it daily. Two hours, hands on, on the real system with real products. Not a presentation.
- Days 8–10 — Run parallel. Keep your existing method going alongside. Compare totals at the end of each day. Differences in the first days are almost always capture discipline rather than software, and finding them now is exactly the point.
After that, stop the old method. Running two systems indefinitely is the most expensive possible outcome and the most common way a rollout quietly fails — people default to whichever one is easier that afternoon and neither set of records ends up complete.
Your first Z-report and month-end
If you are fiscalised, the end-of-day Z-report is a routine you want established from day one rather than discovered in week three. Close the day, generate the report, confirm the fiscal queue has cleared, and file it. Once that is a habit, month-end stops being an event.
Statutory dates worth putting in the calendar now: SDL and NSSF are due by the 7th of the following month and NHIF by the 9th, with VAT on its own monthly cycle. Our free 2026 tax calendar lists the deadlines, and the public holidays calendar is useful for planning around closures. Model the numbers with the full payroll calculator and VAT calculator.
Five mistakes we see repeatedly
- Everyone is an administrator. Convenient in week one, impossible to audit in month six. Set roles before anyone logs in.
- Products entered without cost prices. Every profit report is then fiction, and correcting it later means re-entering the catalogue.
- Opening stock estimated rather than counted. The variance never resolves itself; it just gets absorbed into "shrinkage" and hides real losses.
- Cash sales recorded later "when it is quiet." They are recorded from memory, and memory is generous to whoever is holding the cash.
- Nobody checks the backup or the fiscal queue. Both fail silently. Ten minutes a month prevents both.
What to do in month two
Once daily trading is stable, the highest-value next steps are usually: switch on the automations that reduce what you have to remember — start with the nightly backup and the daily summary, as set out in the automation guide; put the mobile app in the hands of anyone who works away from the counter; and add the second module you actually need rather than the one that looks most interesting. Common second modules are inventory for multi-location stock, HRM and payroll once you have staff on the books, and CRM if you sell by follow-up rather than over a counter. The full catalogue is in solutions.
Cost, help and what is included
There is a 14-day free trial with full access and no card required. Plans start at TZS 25,000 per month for a single user on the Mfuko tier, and TZS 65,000 per month for five users on the Biashara tier, which is where TRA VFD and inventory unlock. There are no setup fees — onboarding, including VFD setup, data import and team training, is part of the subscription. Modules can be added or removed later and billing prorates. Full tier detail is on the pricing page.
Support runs in English and Swahili by WhatsApp, phone and email, Monday to Friday 08:00–18:00 and Saturday 09:00–14:00 East Africa Time, with emergency cover outside those hours for paying customers. On-site setup can be arranged in Dar es Salaam and major regional towns. If you get stuck at any point in the plan above, message us with a screenshot — it is almost always a five-minute fix.
