ERP System for Business in Egypt

An ERP for a business: one program and one database holding the point of sale, the sales, the purchasing, the stock, the manufacturing and the accounts, with every employee seeing only what they are permitted to see. The system is called Hesaby, and is also presented as United POS. We built it ourselves, its interface is entirely in Arabic, and it is running at a client's premises rather than sitting in a proposal on paper.

• A home page of the period's figures, each one against the period before
• A touch-screen till, an invoice printed at once, and shifts closed with a reconciliation
• Restaurant printing: one copy for the customer, one for the cashier, one for the kitchen
• Sales, returns and collection; supplier invoices whose quantities enter stock directly
• Stock per branch: transfers, stocktake, damaged goods, a code for every item and printed barcode labels
• Manufacturing: component lists, production orders, components deducted automatically on sale
• Accounts: automatic journal entries, trial balance, balance sheet and reports
• An interface entirely in Arabic, search in the side menu, and a day and a night mode

The first thing you open: the period, and the period before it

Sales, purchases, expenses and the net, each figure set against the one before it, so you know whether the month was better or worse without working it out yourself. With it a chart of the last thirty days of sales and the best day in the period, and a table of unpaid invoices and of what is due to suppliers — the two tables that are usually forgotten until the supplier rings. Then quick buttons to sell, add an item, record a purchase, an expense or a customer, and open the reports.

The till, and restaurants

Buttons large enough for a touch screen with the item's name written under each, search by barcode or by name, and items split into categories. Payment in cash, by Visa or on credit, and the invoice prints immediately. Beside the payment methods is a delivery button holding the customer's address, the delivery charge and the courier who took the order out. An order can be held and reopened, because customers interrupt an order and come back to it. Shifts open and close with a reconciliation, so at closing you know what was taken, by which method, and who was on the till.

In a restaurant every order prints three copies: one for the customer, one for the cashier, and one for the kitchen that comes out on the kitchen's own printer or appears on a screen in there.

Stock, item codes and manufacturing

Quantities are held per branch, transfers between branches are recorded, and stocktake and damaged goods have screens of their own. Every item carries a code, and barcode labels print at ready-made sizes. Manufacturing works from components: you write the product's components, you open a production order, the components come off stock automatically when the item sells, and the real cost and the waste show. That suits a kitchen, a workshop and a production line that runs from a recipe or a component list. Anyone who needs machine scheduling, or cost per contracting project, is asking for different work — and we say so before selling rather than after.

The accounts come out of the day's own movement

Entries are generated by the movement itself: the invoice, the return, the collection and the supplier invoice each write their own entry, so the accountant is not re-keying what the cashier already entered. From the entries come the trial balance, the balance sheet and the profit and stock reports, which print and export if you want to work on them outside the program. The program calculates and arranges; it does not replace an accountant who reads the result and tells you what it means.

What the system asks of you before it works

Installing it is not the work. The work is the opening balances: customer and supplier balances and stock quantities as they actually are on the first day, a code for every item written one way rather than three, and training for whoever will use it daily. And the system is only as truthful as what is entered into it: if the cashier rings a sale against the wrong item, or goods leave the store without a note, you will find the number in the program and not the goods on the shelf. These are not faults in software but habits of work, and the program exposes them without fixing them on its own.

This is why there is no price written here: the cost moves with the number of branches and tills, with what you need in manufacturing or in reports of your own, and with the size of the opening-balance work. We put the figures in writing after we have seen the work, and before it starts rather than after.

Electronic invoicing and the tax authority

Issuing electronic invoices through the Egyptian Tax Authority portal is a legal obligation on companies, and we implement that link: registering the unified item codes, signing the invoice, submitting it and receiving its number, and handling whatever is rejected rather than leaving it hanging where nobody sees it. The link is half the work; the other half is your system producing correct invoice data the first time, and that starts with the item code and the customer tax details, not with the link.

We are not tax advisors: your accountant settles the rates and the treatment, and we implement what he settles.

What it does not do, and what we add to it

No ERP is the best one for every company; the best is the one that matches how you already work instead of forcing you to change it. The system as built stands on selling, buying, stock, manufacturing and accounts. What falls outside that — cost per project in contracting, a screen or a report that resembles nothing in it, a link to a program you already run — is custom development that we write and add. And we tell you at the start whether what you are asking for is a small addition or a different system, because the difference between the two is large and you are the one paying it.

ERP for businesses in Egypt

ZEMAVO Technology installs the system, configures it around your own items and accounts, and trains whoever will use it — from New Maadi, next to the Technology Village, so the configuration session happens in your office, changes are discussed face to face, and the talking is in Arabic on Cairo time.