Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, has launched the Nigeria edition of Zoho Books, a cloud-based accounting solution, to help businesses simplify VAT and e-invoicing compliance.
This launch also includes the Nigerian edition of other applications in Zoho’s finance and operations suite, offering businesses AI-native financial tools to manage their finances end-to-end.
“Nigeria has one of the most dynamic business landscapes, and its successful businesses know that there is a competitive advantage that comes from being compliant and having end-to-end visibility into their finances,” says Prashant Ganti, VP of Global Product Strategy and Alliances, Finance and Operations BU, Zoho.
“Yet many businesses still carry a significant amount of manual and time-consuming overhead when it comes to meeting their VAT and e-invoicing obligations. Zoho Books and our broader suite of finance and operations apps change that equation. Businesses will now have AI-native finance applications purpose-built for the Nigerian regulatory environment that streamline their financial operations, scaling with them as their business grows while offering real-time insights every step of the way.”
With the Nigeria edition of Zoho Books, businesses can automatically apply VAT rates in transactions based on item type and customer classification, improving accuracy in tax calculations. They can also automatically handle reverse charge in sales and purchase transactions. Businesses can manage withholding tax across transaction types for both residents and non-residents.
The application can generate VAT Schedules for sales transactions in the format required by the TaxProMax portal. Businesses can generate and submit e-invoices directly to the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) portal or NRS’ Merchant Buyer Solution through an approved e-invoicing service provider.
Beyond compliance, Zoho Books offers invoicing, online payment collections, core accounting capabilities, bank reconciliation, stock tracking, project management, budgeting, and workflow automation.
A recent survey conducted among 100+ SMBs by Zoho revealed that only 24% of Nigerian businesses currently use AI tools for financial management, with 65% citing lack of awareness as the main reason for not adopting AI. Among those businesses that have leaped, 30% report saving between 1-3 hours per week. This shows that the barrier to AI adoption in finance among Nigerian businesses is not reluctance but simply awareness.
Zoho Books removes this barrier by natively embedding AI capabilities that will help businesses operate more efficiently. Businesses can categorize bank transactions with suggestions, retrieve data and display business overview with Ask Zia, use simple prompts to create sales transactions using Cocreate Agent, forecast future trends in reports, detect anomalies in reports, and get invoicing insights from Zia Invoice Agent.
In addition to Zoho Books, the Nigeria edition is also available across other solutions in Zoho’s finance and operations suite such as Zoho Billing (billing software), Zoho Invoice (free invoicing software for small businesses), Zoho Commerce (e-commerce platform), Zoho Inventory (inventory and order management software), Zoho Spend (spend management software), Zoho Expense (travel and expense management software), Zoho Procurement (procurement software), and Zoho Practice (accounting practice management software), giving businesses a VAT-compliant platform to handle every aspect of their financial and operations.
Powerful Platform
Zoho’s finance and operations suite of applications is built on the same platform, enabling instant interoperability and contextual data flow between applications, resulting in improved data accuracy and saved productive hours in manually re-entering data. Bringing 15+ years of experience and innovation, the finance and operations suite provides 16 country-specific editions tailored for local tax and compliance needs, including Kenya, South Africa, UAE, India, Singapore, UK, and USA.
The finance and operations platform offers advanced capabilities, using which businesses can easily customise, scale, and extend the applications according to their requirements. This significantly reduces the need to invest in IT resources and quickly go to market with any change.