If you’ve ever tried to fiscalise your small business in Zimbabwe, then you know just how painful it can be.
For the average person, the process is confusing, expensive, and often designed with large businesses in mind. That’s why when we got a tip about a Bulawayo-based startup offering a fiscalisation Software as a Service solution for ten bucks a month, we had to find out more.
The startup is called RoundIHMP — short for Round Internal Hub Management Portal (yeah, bit of a mouthful) — and they’ve built a full SaaS platform that makes VAT compliance and fiscalisation dead simple. You sign up, and in 12 hours, you’re ready to start issuing fiscalised documents like quotations, invoices, and receipts. All for just $10/month.
As someone who’s gone through the hell of integrating ZIMRA’s fiscalisation API into a custom-built eCommerce setup here at Techzim, let me just say: for the average small business, this is God sent.
Why this matters
ZIMRA’s recent push to expand the VAT net means more and more small businesses are being required to register for VAT and fiscalise. The penalties for not doing so are brutal — charged per day of non-compliance.
But here’s the problem: ZIMRA doesn’t even offer its own fiscalisation solution. They have said a mobile app is coming… but that’s been “in the works” for over a year now. So small businesses are left with a big expensive headache.
Consultants charge upwards of $250 to hook up your system to ZIMRA’s, and that’s before you factor in maintenance, support, and upgrades. Oh, you’ll need an accounting app too! For many small businesses, that’s just not realistic.
This is where RoundIHMP steps in — filling a gap that’s been ignored for years.
How it all started
The platform was built by Thamsanqa Bhala, a self-taught developer. He’s actually a trained electrician by profession, but the idea for RoundIHMP came from years of running his own small business and talking to other entrepreneurs.
“I used to operate a children’s publication company. I was supplying retail stores and from own personal experience of carrying around 5 different books – quotation book and so forth – and me failing to manage my business proiperly because I didn’t have the necessary tools.
And sometimes I would want to do my accounting and find that I have to use systems like Pastel, which are quite expensive and are not suitable for a small business because they are difficult to understand if you’re new to business.
If you’re a small business generating receipts for small amounts like $3 you need software to do that basic functionality without the complex installing of software. So due to these prior experiences that’s when I decided to build a tool to solve that particular need that i as an individual who was starting out in business should have.”
So he decided to build it himself. Even before this moment, Bhala had been tinkering with tech build other stuff, and he felt it was ready to build scratch his itch: With the help of YouTube, Bhala started coding a solution that small businesses could actually use — no consultants, no installations, no big learning curves.
As a self taught developer and with YouTube, I started with the first feature which was documentation and I have been adding features since.
I started 2 years back so I have been building upon layers in terms of what the user wants and I integrate that solution to the system. That way everyone gets catered for. That’s why you see that there are different aspects of it. There’s a part where if you want to use Payroll, and so on…
The fiscalisation feature only launched this year, and Bhala says demand has already started picking up — thanks in large part to ZIMRA’s pressure.
The pain of data costs
Of course, building for small businesses in Zimbabwe also means thinking about things like mobile data. Bhala says many users would sign up and then vanish — not because they didn’t like the platform, but because the cost of internet was too high.
The cost factor of internet data meant that we would get a surge of users and they would then go away because of data prices.
But now with this one people are forced (by ZIMRA) to fiscalise, so I feel this one is going to be the puller of other services that people need but were not using. You know it’s annoying to have fiscalisation on another app, and then on another app you create your business documents. This is all in one place and it becomes easier and cheaper.
RoundIHMP’s Referral Business Model
On the platform, Bhala says they offer a means for others to earn by referring customer, and he hopes this will be the main way of acquiring new customers so they focusing on strengthening the platform.
“We’d like to offload some of the work like customer acquisition to others like Accountants. It loosens the burden on me so that I focus on the security aspects of the business and scaling up – which is a lot of work on its own.”
I found Bhala’s platform particularly interesting because it focuses on an on-the-ground problem. No Silicon Valley built-for-fund-raising and startup-pitching-contests fluff that we techies sometimes focus on.
Just a solution for reals problems faced on the ground by ordinary people, and priced so these ordinary people can access it. Usually, these are the startups that scale into formidable businesses.
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