Ask a finance manager at a growing company in Lagos or Nairobi
Ask a finance manager at a growing company in Lagos or Nairobi what expense management software they use, and you'll often get one of two answers: a tool built for US teams that almost works, or a spreadsheet held together with WhatsApp messages and goodwill. Neither is an accident. It's what happens when every serious expense management software product starts from the same assumption — that your team has corporate cards, your currencies are USD or EUR, and your payment infrastructure runs through Stripe. For African finance teams, none of those assumptions hold.
What we kept hearing from African finance teams
Before we wrote a line of code, we spent time talking to finance managers at growing African companies — startups in Lagos, NGOs in Nairobi, regional businesses operating across Ghana and South Africa. We kept hearing the same things. The tools available were either too expensive, too complicated, or simply designed for a different context. Currency support stopped at USD and EUR. Reimbursement flows assumed everyone had a corporate card. Approval processes were built around org structures that didn't map to how teams actually work on the continent — field offices, matrix management, multi-entity setups that no Western SaaS product had thought to accommodate. The result was a gap that finance teams filled the only way they could.
The workarounds African finance teams were building
In the absence of expense management software that actually fit, teams got creative. Receipts sent over WhatsApp. Expense requests tracked in a shared Google Sheet with seventeen tabs. Approvals happening over email threads that stretched for weeks, with no audit trail and no way to report on what had actually been spent. Finance managers were spending hours each month reconciling what should have been a straightforward process. It worked — until it didn't. And it almost always stopped working around the time a company started to scale.
This isn't a niche problem. The Middle East and Africa expense management software market is projected to reach $0.79 billion by 2025, growing at the second-highest rate of any region globally. The demand is there. The infrastructure to serve it, built natively for African markets, largely wasn't.
What expense management software built for Africa actually needs
Building for African markets isn't a matter of adding a few currency options to an existing product. It requires starting from a different set of assumptions entirely.
Native multi-currency support for African currencies — NGN, KES, GHS, ZAR and others treated as first-class currencies, not edge cases requiring manual workarounds.
Integrations with African payment infrastructure — Paystack and Flutterwave, not just Stripe. The reimbursement flow needs to work through the rails African treasuries actually use.
Mobile money as a first-class reimbursement method — M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, and Airtel Money are how money moves across much of the continent. Expense software that treats them as afterthoughts creates the same manual bottleneck teams were trying to escape.
Receipt capture built for mid-range Android on variable connections — not optimised for the latest iPhone on fast Wi-Fi.
Approval workflows flexible enough for how African organisations actually run — field teams, regional offices, multi-entity structures that don't fit the flat startup org chart most Western tools assume.
Why we built Farthingly
Farthingly exists because no expense management software was starting from those assumptions. Every product we evaluated had been built for a different market and adapted — or not adapted — to fit African teams as a secondary use case. We wanted to build something that started from the African context rather than retrofitting a Western product to fit it. That means the things listed above aren't features we added — they're the foundation the product was built on.
Farthingly is early. There's a lot we're still building, and a lot we're still learning. But we're building in the right direction — with the businesses who need it most, not as an afterthought to a product designed for someone else's market.
What this means for your finance team
If your team is currently managing expenses through a combination of WhatsApp, shared spreadsheets, and a Western tool that almost works — you're not alone, and the problem isn't your process. It's that the software available wasn't built for your context.
Expense management software built for Africa means your NGN expenses don't distort at the reporting stage. It means your field team in Kisumu can submit a receipt on a mid-range Android over 3G and have it land in an approval queue, not a WhatsApp group. It means reimbursements reach people through the payment rails they actually have access to. That's what we're building.
If you're interested in being part of it, start with a free trial. Start your free trial of Farthingly.