Records before software

Every conversation about eTIMS becomes a conversation about software within about four minutes. Which channel, which POS, which integration. It is the interesting part, and for a meaningful number of businesses it is also premature, because invoicing is a recording problem before it is a software problem. If sales are not written down anywhere other than memory, no channel helps. There is nothing to issue a document about.

The test

Ask one question: if someone asked what you sold last Tuesday, could you answer from a record rather than from recollection? Not precisely, not to the shilling - just, is there a record at all. A surprising number of otherwise well-run businesses cannot. The money is tracked, because money is visible. The sales are not, because in a cash-and-M-Pesa business the payment feels like the record. It is not: a payment tells you an amount arrived, and almost nothing else about the transaction.

The buying side is where the exposure is

The other half gets even less attention. What you can substantiate depends on the documents your suppliers gave you, and those arrive as paper, in a drawer, in no order, from people who may not issue them consistently. Most businesses look hard at the selling side because that is the side being asked about. The deductions sitting on the buying side are where the money is, and they depend entirely on whether anyone kept the invoice. Keeping supplier invoices is dull, unglamorous and worth more per hour than almost anything else in this area.

What "good enough" looks like to start

This does not require a system. It requires a consistent place where sales are written down, one line per sale, the same way every day, by whoever is there. A book works. A phone works. The consistency is what matters, not the medium - because the point is to be able to answer the question, and a perfect system used sporadically answers it worse than a rough one used daily. Once that exists, choosing a channel becomes a real decision with a real answer. Before it exists, the choice is between different ways of not recording anything.

Then the software

None of this argues against getting the software right. It argues about order. A business with records and no system has a solvable problem and a week of work ahead of it. A business with a system and no records has bought something that will faithfully produce nothing, and will probably conclude that the system is the problem.