Colombia-based company Alegra has tapped into its first global expansion ever, with Africa as the first stop. The fintech startup chooses Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa to launch its cloud-based accounting software tailor-made for SMBs.
With more than 365 thousand registered users from 25 countries, Alegra has helped small businesses across Latin America in maintaining a simplified bookkeeping process. Now it is coming to Africa to cater to the small businesses with its localized version, which according to co-founder and CEO Jorge Soto are similar in its potential with the Latin American counterpart.
“There are a lot of similarities that we can address from the SMBs aspect,” Jorge says. “We were studying about Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and we saw how economy-wise, they are similar to Latin America with the young people and a lot of SMBs, the government effort on formalizing the companies, and the tax system regulation to get everybody connected on the internet.
“So, we feel like if we have managed to solve the challenges in our home country, we can offer good solutions to SMBs in Africa based on our experience.”
The co-founders also see simplicity as the key to a streamlined product that eases the users.
“It is a very competitive market. Everywhere you go now, there are many software available for SMBs. But they are made for the accountants with advanced knowledge. We want to sell a product that is very easy to use so that even someone without any knowledge about accounting or basic bookkeeping can use our software. And that has been a big difference,” Jorge says.
Meanwhile, CTO and co-founder Santiago Villegas highlight the ease of use experience for the business managers, saying,
“We have a 7 years path helping the Latin America micro, small and medium-sized enterprises by developing a very easy to use platform. Business managers do not need advanced knowledge in accounting to use Alegra. We make it intuitive and very easy to use for them so they can easily keep their business organized.”
According to Jorge, users can keep tabs of their invoices and expenses, create reports, inventory, and track their performance based on real-time information.
