Industrial ERP · Made in Ghana, built for Africa
Bold Factory Less runs the whole company of a factory that transforms materials, in one pack: raw material, production, stock and warehouses, sales, logistics, payroll and real double-entry accounting. No accounting package to complete with bought-in add-ons, no spreadsheets in between: every gesture on the floor writes its own entry, and management comes to read the reports and inspect them. One system, one truth, at a price a growing factory can actually carry.
Why factories choose it
Most industrial software was designed for factories that already have an IT department. This one was designed for the factory floor first, then made rigorous enough for the accountant.
Many factories run on an accounting package, a stock spreadsheet, a payroll tool and a notebook at the weighbridge, then spend the month making them agree. Here it is all one: more than fifty modules sharing the same data, from the truck on the scale to the balance sheet, with nothing to add on and nothing to connect. The breadth you would otherwise look for in the largest ERPs, at the scale of a factory that is growing.
A factory does not need to spend a fortune, wait eighteen months and hire consultants to know what a batch cost. BFL brings the same rigour, at a scale a growing factory can carry: perpetual stock, real cost price, double-entry books.
Nobody re-types anything into the books. Confirming a delivery moves the stock and posts the cost of sales in the same transaction; a payroll run, a loss in transit, a damaged return each write their own entry. So your accountant stops keeping the books and starts reading them: the statements are up to date every day, every line traces back to its entries, and every entry names the document that produced it. And the software always cites a role, never a hard-coded account number, so the chart of accounts stays yours.
Declaring is not validating. Granting is not disbursing. Keeping a recipe is not touching prices. Every decision that matters has a right of its own, from correcting a recorded error to granting a discount at the counter, with a preset per role and an override per person. And a role can work without ever seeing an amount.
When an item has no weight in the catalogue, the software does not compare a partial load: it names the item to complete. A missing figure is said out loud, because a false variance accuses an innocent driver.
Cash, mobile money, cheques after clearing, several banks. Country and currency chosen at installation, from 41 countries. Taxes and contributions stay the company's to set, because rates change by decree; a country pack can install them in one click, checked on their official sources, and a new rate never rewrites the past.
An invoice, a receipt or an advice note freezes the moment it leaves your hands. What happens next is added under its own number, not silently written over the old one. That is what lets you find, a year later, exactly the paper the customer is holding.
Cheques wait on their own account, outside the treasury, until the bank credits them. Your cash position shows what you can actually spend. And if one bounces, the receivable comes back to life on its own, with a letter for the customer.
Six pages you can hand to a bank: what the year produced, what the material cost, what is still owed. Each figure is reached twice, by two independent paths, and if the two disagree, the document prints the difference instead of hiding it.
Installed on site, the factory keeps working when the internet drops. Tablets and phones are first-class: every screen is built to be used standing, in a warehouse, on a 393-pixel display.
The software installs on your own server, under your own domain, with a certificate in your name. Your database is reachable from no public address. Each night one backup carries your accounts and your attachments together, because accounts restored without their documents prove nothing. And the backup is put to the test on a throwaway database: a backup never restored is not a backup, it is a belief.
A cash box can no longer go negative without anyone noticing. When a payment exceeds what the account holds, it is refused, and the refusal says how much is missing, instead of leaving a balanced balance sheet lying about your cash.
The VAT you collected, the tax withheld on salaries and the social contributions are paid from the software itself. The screen shows what you owe, computed from your entries and never from a re-entry; you settle all of it, or the part you can this month. The receipt from the administration is filed next to the payment.
Fuel, tolls and the hired carrier's invoice attach to the trip that consumed them. The cost is shared between the orders the truck carried, by weight, and each delivery shows what it really earned. On our test set, transport reverses the ranking of two orders.
Two handbooks ship with the software. One follows a batch through production, quality and rework, and lists the twenty-two refusals the software can oppose, with their exact wording and the gesture that lifts each one. The other answers the four questions an audit firm asks about somebody else's software. Both end with what the product does not do, because that is the half that earns the rest.
You set the amount above which a disbursement stops being routine. Beyond it, supplier payments, expenses, salaries and customer refunds all wait, and management approves or refuses from its own screen. The entry is born at the approval, not before: as long as nobody has decided, the ledger holds nothing, and the ledger can prove it. The person who asked reads it on screen instead of believing the money gone, and every decision carries the name of whoever took it.
A factory rarely holds one account. The rent leaves one bank, wages another, the phone bill a mobile money wallet. Every payment, expense, purchase or salary now leaves the exact account you name, and comes back to that same account if it is cancelled. Pick a bank account then switch to cash, and the software refuses instead of quietly posting cash against a bank. Nothing changes if you never name one: the default keeps being used.
The run needed less than planned. Instead of keeping the surplus on a shelf or throwing it away, production declares what is going back and says why. Nothing moves at that point, and the screen says so. The store then receives it and decides with the material in front of them: take it back, scrap what cannot be reused, or split between the two. What comes back re-enters at the price it left at, so your average cost does not move, and the order stops carrying material it never used.
A factory carries hundreds of materials and products. Picking one from a list you can only scroll is slow on a tablet, and it is easy to take the line next to the right one. Type any part of what you are looking for, the code or the name, and the list narrows as you type. Short lists that are not catalogues keep their plain drop-down: there is nothing to search through in three entries.
Many factories make part of what they use: the drum, the cap, the bulk. Most software treats them as bought goods or ignores them. Here the component leaves the finished-goods store by its own batches, its cost enters the product that contains it, and the software refuses to declare a batch whose recipe called for a component that never came out. An order whose cost is incomplete says so, on its own screen, and stops saying it the day the component is issued.
Every receipt, issue, delivery, return and count names the store it acts in, prefilled so nobody is slowed down, and a storekeeper can be limited to their own stores. Open a lot and you see how much of it sits in each one. Moving goods from one store to another is a document: it waits in draft, travels in transit without changing either the total or the value of your stock, and the destination records what actually arrived, in several times if the truck comes back. What never arrives does not vanish: it goes to dispute, and a manager settles it, found or lost, on an account of its own.
Stock is counted lot by lot, and the counter never sees the quantity expected: each lot finds its real place, and a lot found where nobody expected it is added on the spot. A lot counted short in one store and found long in another is a lot that was put away wrong, not a loss, and it is corrected without an accounting entry. What the count will post as a loss or a gain is shown before you validate, on the screen and in the report your accountant reads, and if stock moved while you were counting, the screen names what moved.
A delivery note is issued from an issued invoice, and from nowhere else, so the same sale can no longer leave twice; the storekeeper still finds it by the order number. The paper the customer signs lists the lots that left, and the invoice file shows its delivery notes, one click away, and the lots delivered for each article. While nothing has left the warehouse, the invoice can only be cancelled in full, never partly credited for goods that never moved. And what comes back damaged is set aside in a hold store, lot by lot, out of sellable stock, until it is written off with its entry or allocated to staff.
The cost of a product is what went into the machine, not what the recipe planned. In front of each material, the workshop declares what the run really used; what the store had not served leaves stock through that very gesture, and what is left over goes back to the store, which confirms it. An order does not close without that declaration, and the reports show what went beyond the recipe, in quantity and in cost. Material that orders closed long ago never took out is listed and caught up in one click, dated the day the order was closed, so a month already closed is never rewritten behind your back.
Ten bought, two free is written on the invoice itself, and the goods leave stock at cost as a sales expense instead of a sale at zero that would inflate your stock. A gift to a visitor or to an administration, and an allocation to your own staff, go through their own screen, with who received it and why, each landing on its own account: you can answer what the quarter was given away, and to whom. The discount granted to a customer, by your early payment rule or typed in amount at the counter with its reason, is read on an account of its own and printed on the receipt, so you know what your collection policy costs you.
The tax office, customs, the local assembly, the social security fund and the regulators each owe you a calendar. Here they share one: every obligation with its dated rate and its due date, recorded the day it arises, declared, then paid through the approval gate, and what you owe each authority reads on its own statement like a supplier's. A permit paid in January is spread over its twelve months instead of sinking January. For Ghana, one click installs the GRA, SSNIT, your assembly and the EPA with their rates, checked on their official sources, and touches nothing you had already set up.
The software keeps back what the law requires: the right nature from what is paid, goods, services or rent, on the amount before VAT, at the rate of the day for a resident or not, once the supplier's payments of the year pass the threshold. You may keep back another amount, but you say why, and the reason stays on the payment. The supplier leaves with a numbered certificate, and the month's schedule to file is checked against your ledger, to the cent.
HR keeps the people, their careers and their time; the payroll officer prepares and pays; the accountant disburses. Attendance is recorded from a tablet against the planned schedule, hours and overtime are computed, never typed, and payroll pays them at your rates, monthly, twice a month or by the day, without ever paying the same day twice. Contractors and agency staff are recorded without a payslip. When someone leaves, the final settlement is paid to the half-day and the person leaves with a certificate of employment that says nothing it should not. And your dashboard shows what your workforce costs, not only what it takes home.
A payment keyed twice, a supplier paid the wrong amount, a manual entry on the wrong account, an opening taken over with the wrong figure: each is undone by its own gesture, which reads back the entry it undoes and returns it line by line on the accounts really used. The document stays visible, marked Cancelled, with its reason. Delete removes an item from every list without ever erasing it, and the Super Admin can restore it. Reorganise your chart of accounts today: tomorrow's corrections stay exact.
A loan enters the books the day the money arrives, on the account you name. Its schedule is built at drawdown and adjusts to the bank's own table; each instalment paid writes one entry that separates capital, interest and penalty, above your approval ceiling if it is large. What you still owe is never typed: it is deduced from what you paid, lender by lender.
Sold, collected, still owed, overpaid and paid but not delivered, over the period you choose, each figure next to the ledger's, with a one-page summary for the meeting. Opening stock taken over at the wrong cost is brought back to its real cost in one gesture, and the cost of sales already posted follows. Foreign exchange gains and losses have their own register, with the two rates of every operation. And before the first update reaches your server, we measure your own database: that is how we catch what no test sees.
Sales of the period shows every invoice excluding tax, its tax and what the customer pays, then checks by itself that the total excluding tax is what the ledger carries in sales. When the two differ, the screen lists the invoices and credit notes that make the difference. The aged balance does the same against the customers' account. Your accountant no longer hunts for a gap: he reads it.
Even when it has been paid. One button cancels the invoice with a credit note and issues a new one at the same price excluding tax, with VAT on every line. What the customer already paid is carried over, so he owes only the VAT. Goods already delivered count for the new invoice and never leave twice, and the invoice he received is never rewritten. Only the people you allow can do it, and they say why.
A carton does not come in quarters: jars, cartons and labels leave the store in whole units, counted on the whole order, so twelve more jars never open a second carton. Before an order closes, the workshop sees every material, planned, requested, released and consumed, and sends the rest back to the store in one click, or declares part of it damaged; the store confirms. The quality check counts apart the units a test used up, and their cost goes to the good units, as IAS 2 requires.
Inside the software
The full inventory
Nothing here is a promise for later. Each module below exists in the software today, with its own screens listed under it. A module is not a chapter in a brochure: it is a right the factory switches on or off, and gives to a person verb by verb. Names are kept in English, exactly as you will find them once you sign in.
The first screen of the day, and the one the owner opens at night.
Dashboard · Executive cockpit
From the client file to the signed delivery note: one chain, no re-keying.
Clients · Client Orders · Order readiness · Invoicing · Delivery Notes · Finished Goods Catalog · Marketing & Commercial · My Space
Every movement of money, and where it landed in the books.
Payments · Cheques to Collect · Payment Declarations · Deposits & Advances · Client Debts · Wallets · Expenses · Bank Loans · Tax & Government · Asset Profitability
Buying raw material without losing the thread between order, reception and invoice.
Raw Material Catalog · Suppliers · Raw Material Purchases · Supplier Invoices · Supplier Credits
Perpetual stock, real lots, and a scale that tells the truth.
Raw Material Stock · Finished Goods Stock · Inventory · Weighbridge
Which vehicle, which driver, which orders, with or without a weighbridge.
Logistics · Returnable packaging
Recipes, orders, shop floor, quality, and what a batch really cost.
Workshops · Production Teams · Machines · Machine Stops · Routings · Recipes (BOM) · Production Orders · Quick Production · Live Shop Floor · Quality Control · Scraps · Reprocessing · Costs & valuation
The screen that repairs the past without rewriting it.
Regularization
Double-entry books that were never typed twice, and that correct themselves the way an auditor would.
Accounting · Fixed Assets · Annual report · Budgets · Reports
The people, their time and their pay: a section of its own, because a timesheet posts no entry.
HR & Payroll · Work Time · Staff loans
Who may do what, what happened, and how the company is set up.
Company Settings · Email · Business rules · Users · Notification broadcast · Audit Log · Data Import
It does not stop here
Every line below shipped, was tested against a real factory, and is in the product today. Version 4 is the one where the books stopped being only a record: taxes and contributions are paid from the software, income tax is computed before the year is closed, machines are carried as assets and depreciated, and a cash account can no longer go negative in silence. It is also the version installed on a customer's own server, under the customer's own domain. Since then the shop floor has caught up with the books: real warehouses counted lot by lot, a transfer note that follows the goods on the road, and a sale that leaves the warehouse through a single door. Then version 4.100 gave people their own section, from attendance to the final settlement, put every authority and every deadline on one screen, and taught the books to correct themselves the way an auditor would. Still on the bench: the SYSCOHADA chart of accounts for the OHADA zone, whose engine and countries are in place and awaiting their chart.
Registers, the commercial chain, purchasing and stock, production, finance and HR, with PDF documents and the first factories installed.
Perpetual stock, payroll components posted to the books. Then one audit per module, each finding settled version by version: FEFO, thresholds, cheques after clearing, blocking quality control, warehouse transfers, losses valued at cost.
Balanced balance sheet with stock reconciled to the ledger, VAT, multi-bank on every flow, treasury. And a separate universe for the owner, with reports, PDF export and sharing.
Eight verbs per module and overrides per person; real material cost, production costs allocated, full cost and margin per item; commercial agents with provisioned commissions and rebates.
An advance becomes a real receivable with a schedule and a transferable ratio. The chart of accounts is neutralised and administrable, country and currency are chosen at installation, and payroll computes tax and contributions from dated scales.
The 143 role-based guards converted into rights; documents stop opening by their address. Then explicit deployment modes, private file storage, portable backups, maintenance mode. And a first factory running hosted, updating itself.
Loads that exist with or without a weighbridge, a vehicle and driver register, assignment refused when a truck is already taken, real loaded quantities carried into the delivery note and the order, the credit note suggested and pre-filled, expected weight at the gate, and raw material collected the other way round.
Payroll components, deductions and absences are set by the company, not by us. Email leaves from your own address. And the cost price stops being an estimate: real material cost, production costs allocated, stock adjustments and by-products all carried to the item.
Urgency before production, blocking quality control, a TV mode on the workshop wall, and reprocessing separated from scrap. On the purchasing side, one chain in three documents (order, invoice, goods receipt), so you never pay for what has not arrived, and stock never rises before the loading bay.
From a finished batch back to the materials that made it, and forward to the customer who received it. Receivables ageing that reconciles with the general ledger, account by account, with a PDF per account. And a rule that settles an old class of bug: a balance is never stored, it is computed, so two screens can no longer disagree.
A real year-end close, then a six-page annual report that prints its own controls: each figure reached twice, by two independent paths. Cheques received sit outside the treasury until the bank credits them, with their advice notes and the unpaid case handled. Returnable packaging gets its own third-party account. Services can be purchased, invoiced and scanned. And the budget compares itself to the ledger, salaries included.
A trip carries its fuel, its tolls and the hired carrier's invoice, and that cost is shared between the orders the truck carried, by weight: a distant delivery stops showing the same margin as the one next door. A material stops costing what the invoice says and starts costing that plus the truck that fetched it. The annual report gains last year's figures beside this year's, and an Excel export so the accountant receives numbers rather than a picture of numbers. Bank accounts get a screen of their own. A user account now designates an employee, so a transfer keyed by HR shows on the account at once. And the owner gets his customers, what each owes, what is overdue, and what the company owes in return.
Taxes and contributions are paid from the software: what you owe is computed from your entries, you settle all of it or the part you can, and the receipt is filed next to the payment. Income tax is computed before the year is closed, from rates you set yourself, with the passage from accounting profit to taxable profit entered line by line. A withholding at source stops leaving a phantom receivable. Machines enter as assets and depreciate month by month, and land refuses to carry a duration. A cash account can no longer go negative in silence. And the whole thing now runs on a customer's own server, under the customer's own domain, with a nightly backup that carries the documents along with the accounts, and puts itself to the test.
Reconciling a bank statement stops being a spreadsheet exercise: the software matches what it knows against what the bank says, and names what neither side explains. On the shop floor, machine set-up is timed apart from the run, an overrun raises the alarm once and then keeps quiet, a step finished too fast has to be justified, and quality control says what it did instead of only passing or failing. And the money a factory already holds on the day it starts is entered on ITS OWN accounts, every bank, every till, every mobile money wallet, instead of three boxes that forced two real accounts into one.
Management approves before a large payment goes out, above a ceiling you set, and the decision carries the name of whoever took it. Bringing an existing factory in is now checked entry by entry, stock included, and stock is the largest line of an opening balance sheet, the one no report used to check. Components a factory makes itself, the drum, the cap, the bulk, finally count in the price of what they go into, and the software refuses to declare a batch that never took them out. Every payment, expense, purchase or salary now leaves the exact account you name, comes back to that same account if it is cancelled, and is refused outright if the account does not match the payment method. And what a workshop did not consume goes back to the store: production declares it, the store receives it and decides, take it back or scrap it, at the price it left at, so the average cost does not move.
A customer may pay more than they owe: the split is shown in plain words before anything is saved, and the surplus stays on their account. The approval ceiling now holds on expenses, on salaries and on customer refunds, not only on supplier payments, and the same payroll can no longer be sent for approval twice. An order and its invoice are delivered together, so one sale stops receiving two delivery notes. What the factory gives away gets its accounts: the discount to a customer who pays early, the gift outside the customer base, the allocation to staff. By-products and saleable waste, weighed and counted in bags, lower the cost of what they came from. Quick Production launches a run from a tablet in four gestures, without simplifying anything behind the scenes. And the workshop declares what it really consumed before an order can be closed.
Material that closed orders never took out of the store is caught up in one click, and a Consume button now stands in front of every raw material. Every stock movement names its warehouse, each storekeeper can be assigned to theirs, each workshop to the store that supplies it, and every warehouse has its own file. Stock is counted lot by lot, without showing the counter what is expected, so putting something away wrong stops being booked as a loss. A transfer note carries goods from one store to another, article by article and lot by lot, through transit, and what never arrives goes to dispute instead of disappearing. Goods now leave only from an issued invoice: the delivery note and the invoice both show the lots that left, and what comes back damaged waits in a hold store until it is written off or allocated to staff. And when you name the store goods leave from, the software offers only what that store holds, showing a plain 0 for an item it has run out of.
Delete arrives everywhere, and nothing is ever erased: the Super Admin finds every deleted item on its own screen and can restore it. HR gets two roles of its own, departments and positions with a salary range, and careers that leave a trace. Work Time describes what each person should work, the team leader records attendance from a tablet, and leave is requested, approved and counted. Payroll pays hours at your rates, the thirteenth month the way you pay it, twice a month or by the day, and shows what a run will cost before it is signed. Contractors and agency staff are recorded without a payslip. A departure closes what must close, pays the final settlement to the half-day and hands over a certificate that carries no reason. Leave earned is provisioned on its own, and the dashboard shows what the workforce costs.
The menu says who each screen belongs to: people apart from the books, treasury apart from third parties. An update arrives as a sealed package holding only the version you accepted, and installs itself at night once you have said yes. A receipt that arrives late joins its expense without undoing anything, and a screen with nothing to offer says why. Bank loans get their lenders, their schedule and their repayments, each written in one entry. The cost of material consumed late reaches the products it made, in stock or already sold. And every cancellation reads back the entry it undoes, line by line, instead of rebuilding it.
A payment keyed by mistake, a supplier payment typed wrong, a manual entry on the wrong account: each is undone in one gesture on the accounts it had touched. An opening taken over with the wrong amount is corrected against opening equity, and opening stock carried at the wrong cost comes back to its real cost with the cost of sales already posted. A supplier paid too much becomes a claim on its own account. Exchange gains and losses are declared in the payment itself, with their two rates, and gather in a register of their own. A single screen shows the money position of any period, checked against the ledger, and a delivery note offers only what is still to deliver.
The tax office, customs, the local assembly and the regulators share one schedule: each obligation with its dated rate and due date, recorded, declared and paid through the approval gate, with a statement per authority. A permit paid in advance spreads over its months, and the month's VAT moves to the authority's account without ever being paid twice. The Ghana pack installs the lot in one click, rates checked on their sources. Paying a supplier now calculates the withholding tax and issues its certificate, and the counter can grant a discount in amount, with its reason, to those you allow.
Sales of the period shows every sale excluding tax and checks it against the ledger, naming the documents that make any difference, and the aged balance no longer counts an overpayment as paying its invoice. A reservation is released the moment its goods leave, whatever note they leave on, and those still held after delivery are listed for release. An invoice can be re-issued with VAT, even paid, carrying over what was paid. Cartons and other counted materials leave in whole units, closing an order shows every material and sends the rest back to the store, the quality check counts its samples apart and adds their cost to the good units, and the launch of a stock count follows the permission you give.
Deployment
The server sits in the factory. Workstations, tablets and phones reach it over the local network. No internet, no interruption. And the weighbridge indicator is wired directly to it.
Your own machine, your own domain, reachable from several sites. Backups are portable: what leaves one installation can be restored on another. Each update arrives as a sealed package holding only the version you accepted, checked for integrity before anything is done with it, and installs itself at night, in the window you choose.
Nothing to install. Updates and database migrations arrive on their own, and the version history says exactly what changed. Automatic weighbridge capture stays a job for an on-site installation.
A demonstration is done on your own products, your own units and your own recipes, not on a sample database. Tell us what you transform, and we will set it up.
