Accounting has always been viewed as a tedious job by African business owners, from hiring an accountant that would incur an extra cost to manually inputting it into books or just taking a mental note. Majority of African business owners still do their bookkeeping manually and find it really difficult to track inventories, bills and invoices.

According to the SMEDAN National survey of 2017, there are around 41.5 million SMEs in Nigeria. SMEs are businesses with less than N100 million in annual turnover and have less than 300 employees. 82% of small businesses fail due to poor financial management.

Enter Abacus Africa, an accounting software created by Africans for Africans. Abacus is going to be a web-based software created with the sole purpose of helping business owners across Africa carry out their accounting activities in one place,. This will help to simplify and also minimize the chances of missing out on valuable transaction details.

We are passionate about assisting businesses to grow their business by providing digital accounting solutions (with a focus on bookkeeping), particularly in emerging markets within Africa. Our goal is to become the go to software for Africans looking for reliable digital accounting solutions. With just a few clicks they can always be up to date with the financial state of their businesses and measure how well their businesses are doing.

Abacus is targeting business owners with restaurants, supermarkets, online & physical stores, service providers, freelancers and even down to the mini stores or kiosks. Abacus Africa is still in the development stages and it is being developed by a team of great young minds within the SideHustleNG Bootcamp.

Yeah, you heard that right, a group of interns fresh out of training under SideHustle's Internship, a talent management company that provides global businesses and startups with the right remote talents & teams. After an intensive 6-week training period, interns are given the opportunity to put their hard and soft skills to work. They are tasked with building a startup along with interns from various tracks(I know, I think it’s pretty cool too!).

Let's get back to Abacus and its amazing works, shall we? The start-up building process has definitely had some challenges and learning points along the way. One worthy of note is finding out that most business owners use crude methods to manage their finances. Many would rather have an employee manually input accounts into a book, or employ other means that are just as obsolete.

The goal of the Abacus team is to create a simple and user-friendly accounting system, that would help users consolidate all of their accounting systems into one dashboard. Users will be able to get their financial performance reports when needed. They can easily keep track of their bills, expenses, and inventory with just a click of a button. Many other features will also be included.

The Abacus team so far has carried out a survey, created a product requirement document that includes all of our goals & features, team flyers, a great logo, user flow of the web-app, a product backlog and we're getting ready for practice pitch soon.

It’s safe to say Abacus is soon going to become one of the giants of the African tech industry and is going to solve a lot of financial management problems for Africans, this is for sure only the beginning!