Building Software for
Tanzanian Businesses

Why we started with the boring parts

Most business software sold into Tanzania was designed somewhere else and translated afterwards. It handles a sales invoice beautifully and then falls over on the things that consume a Tanzanian finance team's week: transmitting a fiscal receipt to TRA, splitting a payment that arrived as three separate M-Pesa pushes, computing NSSF and SDL on a payroll where half the staff are paid weekly, or producing a report a bank will actually accept for a working-capital application.

Tawala was founded in Dar es Salaam in 2024 by a team of Tanzanian software engineers who had spent years watching businesses buy a foreign system, then hire a person whose entire job was to bridge the gap between what the software produced and what the regulator, the bank or the auditor required. We took the view that those bridging tasks are not edge cases. In this market they are the core of the product, and everything else is comparatively easy.

That is why the first things we built properly were fiscalisation, mobile money and statutory payroll — not dashboards. It is a slower way to start and a much harder thing to demo, but it is the difference between software that looks good in a meeting and software that survives a month-end.

Who we are

We are a privately held Tanzanian software company headquartered in Dar es Salaam, at Block 45C Kijitonyama, Cameroon Road. Our engineering, product, support and sales functions are all based in Tanzania — there is no offshore team you get handed to at 6pm. Tawala is funded by its founders together with customers and Tanzanian angel investors, which is a deliberate choice: it means our runway depends on customers renewing rather than on a growth story sold to someone abroad.

The company is led by Mathayo Kapela, CEO and founder. Kuma Kagoso leads sales, Winston Ruge leads customer support, and Asha Abdala leads marketing. As of today more than 500 businesses across Tanzania run on Tawala — retailers, logistics operators, schools, workshops, property managers, pharmacies and mobile-money agents among them.

We are registered with the Personal Data Protection Commission and our fiscalisation integration is TRA-certified. If you are conducting vendor due diligence and need registration or certification particulars in writing for a procurement file, ask us directly and we will send them.

What we actually build

Tawala is one platform with modules that share a single database. The core is CRM and sales, inventory, finance and TRA VFD, HR and payroll and point of sale. Around that sit sector and function modules — projects, fleet, property management, hotel PMS, manufacturing and wakala management for mobile-money agents. The full catalogue is in solutions.

Everything runs in a browser and on an Android app that records locally and syncs when the connection comes back — because a system that stops working when the network does is not a system, it is a liability.

The free tools, and why we publish them

We maintain a large public library of free Tanzanian business calculators and document templates: PAYE, NSSF, VAT, SDL, WCF, withholding tax, customs duty, vehicle import duty, BRELA registration cost, land rent and many more. No sign-up, no email capture, no watermark.

There is a commercial motive and we would rather state it than pretend otherwise: people who find a calculator useful sometimes become customers. But the tools also serve a purpose we care about independently. They are the most honest possible demonstration of whether a vendor understands the rules you operate under. Anyone can claim compliance expertise on a features page. Publishing a PAYE calculator that produces the same number the TRA does is a claim you can check in thirty seconds — and one you can hold us to if we get it wrong.

We keep them current against published statutory rates and update them when rates change. If you find a discrepancy, tell us; corrections from accountants and payroll officers have improved these tools more than anything we have done internally. Browse the full set in the tools directory.

How we work with customers

• We do onboarding ourselves, and it is included. There are no setup fees. Data import, TRA VFD configuration and team training are part of the subscription, not a separate professional-services invoice.
• Support is 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.
• On-site setup is available in Dar es Salaam and major regional towns; elsewhere we set up remotely.
• Month to month, cancel any time. Annual plans do not auto-renew unless you ask them to. We would rather lose a customer cleanly than trap one.
• Modules are à la carte. Add or remove them as the business changes; billing prorates.

Pricing starts at TZS 25,000 per month and is published in full on the pricing page. We do not run a "call us for pricing" model below enterprise scale, because opaque pricing wastes everyone's time and disadvantages the smallest buyers most.

Your data

Your business data belongs to you. We process it to run the service you have subscribed to, and our obligations are set out in the data processing agreement and the privacy policy, with technical controls described on the security page. Exports are available so that leaving is possible — a promise that costs a vendor nothing to make and quite a lot to actually honour, which is precisely why it is worth checking with anyone you are evaluating, including us.

Where we are going

The near-term work is depth rather than breadth: making the modules that most customers already use harder to break, faster on poor connections, and better at producing the specific documents Tanzanian businesses have to produce for banks, auditors and regulators. Longer term we want Tawala to be the default answer when a Tanzanian business asks what to run on — and that is earned one renewal at a time, not announced.

If you want to work on this, see careers. If you are a journalist or analyst, the press page has our materials. If you want to ask us something specific — including hard questions about limitations — contact us. We would rather tell you we are a poor fit than sell you a year you regret.