Questions
Questions, answered plainly.
- What is Records ERP?
- Records ERP is manufacturing and inventory software for manufacturers and distributors in Kenya and East Africa. It records sales and invoices, stock across every store, production and packaging runs with bills of materials, purchases and expenses, payments, and full accounts — profit and loss, trial balance, balance sheet and account ledgers — in one system, so nothing is entered twice.
- Who is it for?
- Small and medium manufacturers and distributors in Kenya — businesses that make or move physical goods, usually across more than one store, and that are finding a notebook or a spreadsheet no longer keeps up.
- Can it handle cartons, cases and pieces?
- Yes. You tell it once that a carton is 36 bars, then buy by the kilo, count in bars and sell by the carton — it does the conversion everywhere, including in costs and reports.
- Can it cost a production run?
- Yes. You record what a recipe consumes, and Records ERP works out what the finished goods cost. If you later correct the price you paid for a raw material, the cost of goods you have already sold is corrected with it — through the production run and across any transfers between stores.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes. Records ERP runs in the browser and installs to an Android phone or a Windows laptop as an app, so it opens from the home screen with no address bar. There is nothing to download from an app store.
- Can my staff see everything?
- Only what you allow. A sales rep can be limited to their own customers, a store keeper to their own store, and only you need to see the profit figures. Every change is recorded with who made it and when.
- Does it produce a trial balance and a balance sheet?
- Yes. Records ERP produces a trial balance, a balance sheet, a profit and loss statement and a ledger for every account, alongside the VAT summary and aging report. The figures are built from the invoices, payments, bills and stock movements already recorded, so you can open any total and see the transactions behind it. If the statements ever fail to balance, the report says so on its face rather than presenting a figure that cannot be true.
- Can I bring my existing customers, products and balances across?
- Yes. You upload a spreadsheet, see your own rows on screen, correct anything highlighted, and bring them across. Customers and suppliers come in with the balance they owed you at changeover; products come in with their units and prices. If you get it wrong you can undo the whole import in one action.
- Can I get my data out again?
- Yes, whenever you want, without asking anyone. Every sales line, invoice, payment, customer, product, supplier and expense can be downloaded as a CSV, or all of it at once as a single archive. Add up a money column in a spreadsheet and it matches what Records ERP shows.
- How is it different from QuickBooks or Zoho Books?
- Those are accounting packages. They handle invoices, bills and accounts well and do not handle making things at all — no bills of materials, no production runs, no stock costed across several stores. Records ERP does both: the accounts an accountant expects, and the production and stock a factory runs on. What it deliberately does not do is file your taxes with the KRA. It produces the figures and the sales data your accountant needs, and they file.
- Can my customers see their own account?
- Yes. You can send a customer a link — usually over WhatsApp — that opens their statement, invoice or receipt on their phone. They see only their own account with you, and they do not need to create an account or install anything.