Aide Central · in development
A POS that keeps books,
not a POS that keeps receipts.
Two parts of one system. Aide POS runs the counter — offline when the network goes, mobile money and cash on the same sale, and the book for customers who pay later. Aide Books turns every one of those sales into accounts, without anybody typing them twice.
Already in the pilot? Sign in and open your POS. Otherwise, see what we can set up for you today.
This is not on sale yet, and we are not taking money for it. The page is here so you can see what we are building and tell us where it is wrong.
Why we are building it
The records are the reason the money never comes.
There are around 1.1 million micro, small and medium businesses in Uganda. Roughly seven in ten have credit needs nobody is meeting, and only about one in ten has a bank account or a line of credit at all.
The reasons are the ones you would expect — no collateral, no credit history, rates that do not work. But sitting alongside them, named by the IFC in the same breath, is something a business can actually fix: no proper financial records. No accounts, no statements, nothing a lender can assess. So assessing the loan costs more than the loan is worth, and the answer is no before anyone looks at the business.
A shop that has been trading profitably for six years can be unbankable for want of a record of it. That is the gap this closes — not by asking anyone to become a bookkeeper, but by making the ordinary act of selling something produce the record as a by-product.
One vault, two doors
Take either. They are the same data.
The POS writes down what happened. The books work out what it means. Take both and nothing is ever entered twice; take one and the other is waiting the day you want it.
Aide POS
Built for a shop with one phone, thin data and a drawer somebody else is minding. All of it is inside Aide Books as well — take this on its own only if you want the counter today and the books later.
- Sells offline and syncs in order when the data comes back
- Cash, MTN, Airtel and the book — split across one sale
- Sells the same stock by piece, by kilo or by the bag
- Counts the drawer at close and names the difference
- Shows the owner the day from wherever they are
Aide Books
Bank and mobile money in, categorised, reconciled, and turned into statements that print.
- Pulls in bank and mobile money statements and sorts them
- Invoices, receivables and who still owes you
- A profit and loss and a balance sheet, always current
- What you owe URA this year, and when
- A pack you can hand a lender without preparing anything
Aide Comply
The software, and a licensed accountant who actually looks at it every month and files what is due.
- Everything in Aide Books, counter included
- A named accountant reviewing the month
- Your returns prepared and filed on time
- Told before a deadline, not after it
These are the prices, not estimates. Aide POS and Aide Books are priced on what software costs to run; Aide Comply is priced on what a licensed accountant costs, which is why the step up is a real one. One URA return is included each month and a further return is 40,000/=.
Built for here
The five things imported software gets wrong
It stops when the network does
Power goes. Data thins. A POS that needs a connection to take money is a POS that closes the shop. Ours writes the sale to the phone and queues it — and because every sale carries an identifier made on the device, a queue replayed after three days cannot count anything twice.
It does not understand the book
Selling on credit to people you know is not an edge case here, it is how trade works. Every credit sale names who owes it, moves their balance and posts to receivables at the same moment. A repayment moves it back. There is no separate exercise book to fall out of step.
It thinks a product has one price
Sugar goes out by the half kilo, the kilo and the fifty-kilo bag. Cement by the bag and the pallet. All three draw down the same shelf, so the store count and the books agree without anybody converting anything.
It ignores mobile money
There were 2.55 billion mobile money transactions in Uganda between April and June this year, across 37.8 million active accounts. Cash and MoMo settle the same sale all day. Both belong on the same screen, and neither should need re-keying.
It has no answer for the drawer
Most owners are not standing at their own counter. Close the day, count the cash, and the system says what should be there and who was on. One short evening is noise. The same name four evenings running is a fact, with dates on it.
EFRIS
What we will not pretend about
EFRIS is not a return you file at month end. It is per-invoice and in real time: the invoice goes to URA, URA validates it and sends back a fiscal document number and a QR code, and that is what the customer is legally given.
It applies once you are VAT registered — turnover above UGX 300 million a year, or a quarter of that over three consecutive months — and URA keeps extending it by sector. That threshold doubled from 150 million on 1 July 2026, so a good many businesses that had to register last year no longer do.
This version does not fiscalise invoices. If you tell it you are VAT registered, it prints plainly on the receipt that the sale is recorded but not yet fiscalised, and you raise the fiscal invoice on URA's portal. That is a real inconvenience and we would rather you knew about it now than discovered it in month two.
Direct integration means certification with URA on their timetable, not ours — so we will not put a date on it. Below the VAT threshold, which is where most businesses reading this are, none of it applies.
Scope
What the first version will not do
Listed here because a short honest list is worth more than a long list of things that half work.
- Many branches. One shop, one POS, one drawer. Branch consolidation comes after the single shop is genuinely good.
- Terminals, drawers and scanners. It runs on the Android phone or tablet you already have, and prints to a cheap Bluetooth thermal printer. No terminal to buy.
- Payroll. Separate problem, separate rules, later.
- EFRIS fiscalisation. As above.
- Audit. We produce books an auditor can work from. We do not audit them — an auditor must be independent of whoever kept them, and that is the whole point of an audit.
The pilot
We would rather build it with ten shops than at them.
If you run a shop, a bar, a pharmacy or a hardware store and you would use this, tell us. Pilot businesses pay nothing, get set up in person, and get to argue with us about what it should do — which is the part we actually need.