The problem

When Aline took over finance at Kigali Food Wholesale in late 2024, she inherited a desk with three piles of paper on it. The left pile was invoices waiting to go out. The middle pile was invoices that had gone out but nobody had filed. The right pile — the biggest one — was invoices the owner thought were probably paid but couldn’t prove.

“The right pile was the one that kept me up,” Aline told us. “You can’t bank a maybe.” The business was doing roughly 180 million RWF in annual sales through a mix of standing orders, walk-in wholesale, and credit-terms customers. Payment records lived in three places: a paper receipt book for cash, a WhatsApp thread for MoMo, and the owner’s memory for bank transfers. Month-end closed in three days, and only if nobody went on sick leave.

The specific moment that tipped her into looking for a tool was a phone call in December 2024. A customer — one of the company’s oldest — had paid an invoice in October that was still showing open. The customer wasn’t angry; they were worried the business wasn’t paying attention to its own money. That stung.

Why GwizaSuite

Aline looked at three options: stay on Excel, move to QuickBooks, or try GwizaSuite. Her accountant voted QuickBooks. She tried the QuickBooks trial for a week and couldn’t get RRA VAT to compute the way she’d learned it. “I was translating American tax categories to Rwandan ones in my head all day,” she said. “It felt like doing my taxes in a second language.”

GwizaSuite came up through a colleague. The thing that sold her wasn’t the feature list — it was the demo. “The salesperson showed me the VAT export. It produced the file the RRA wanted, with the columns they wanted, in the order they wanted. I didn’t have to adjust anything. I closed the demo and called my owner.”

Implementation

The first 30 days were not a smooth slide. Aline’s team had to import ten months of historical invoices, and the first attempt rejected half of them because the customer records were inconsistent. “Half my customers had three different spellings in three different places,” she said. She spent a Saturday normalizing customer names — sixty customers, thirty minutes of coffee, done by lunch.

What surprised her was how quickly her storekeeper adopted it. She’d expected resistance — he was 52, had been with the company 14 years, and hadn’t used anything more complicated than Excel. He was on the Inventory module by day three. “He told me the batch and expiry tracking was the first software feature he’d ever used that made his job easier instead of harder. I nearly cried.”

The turning point

Three weeks in, Aline ran the overdue invoices report for the first time. The report surfaced 47 invoices aged 60 days or more — invoices the company had forgotten about, distributed across 32 customers. The total outstanding was 2.1 million RWF.

She printed the list. She called every customer on it that week. Some had the invoices lost in email. Some had paid and the payment had never been allocated. Some had simply waited to be asked. By the end of the second week, 38 of the 47 had paid. Another 6 paid over the following month. Three were genuinely bad debt and were written off with a reason code.

That one report, run in the first month, paid for GwizaSuite 26 times over at its monthly cost. The owner, who had voted against the software in the initial meeting, asked Aline to build the dashboard he could check from his phone.

90 days in

By day 90, all four core modules were in production. Month-end close dropped from 3 days to 4 hours. On-time collection rate went from 71% to 89%. The business retired four separate tools it had been using — a paper receipt book, two different spreadsheets, and an invoicing app that had never been properly configured.

The first RRA audit happened in March 2026, two months after go-live. Aline handed over the export bundle before the auditor had finished their coffee. “The auditor looked at me,” she said, “and asked what tool we used. I gave him the name. That was the entire audit.”

I used to be the person who said ‘I need to check and get back to you.’ Now I’m the person who answers the question before the owner finishes asking it.— Aline Uwase, Finance Manager, Kigali Food Wholesale

The 2.1 million RWF headline number was the first month. What matters more to Aline is that the number stopped growing. Since go-live, overdue invoices aged 60+ days have been under 400K RWF in aggregate across the entire book, and they never stay there long — the weekly ageing report surfaces them before they become a problem.