We build the software
businesses run on.
CoreStack is a software engineering company based in Africa. We build systems for businesses that need more than accounting software, more than a stock system, and more than another app that does one job in isolation. Most importantly, we build software we expect businesses to depend on every day.
- 14
- Modules
- 113
- Capabilities
- 62
- Reports
- Accounting & Finance8
- ZRA Smart Invoice7
- Human Resources & Payroll10
- Inventory & Warehousing8
- Procurement & Supply Chain9
- CRM & Sales10
- Loan Management10
- Fixed Assets8
- Retail & Point of Sale6
- Hospitality & Tourism9
- Project Management7
- Media Buying6
- Budgeting & Planning5
- Platform & Governance10
We didn't start outtrying to build an ERP.
We were building software for businesses and kept running into the same problem. A company would have accounting in one system, payroll in another, stock in Excel and sales somewhere else. Payments were coming through the bank, cash and mobile money. Each system worked on its own, but none of them really knew what the others were doing.
Then month end came, and someone had to sit down and make everything agree.
We saw enough of this to realise the problem wasn't a lack of software. Businesses already had plenty of software. The problem was that nothing was connected.
So we started building it differently. Accounting became the foundation. Sales connected to stock. Stock connected to purchasing. Payroll connected to finance. Payments connected back to the transactions they belonged to.
That work eventually became CoreStack ERP, and we have been building on it ever since.
What we build.
CoreStack ERP
Accounting, payroll, inventory, procurement, sales, POS, lending, assets, expenses and reporting. Sell something and the system knows what happened to stock and what happened financially. Run payroll and the entries reach the accounts.
This is where most of our engineering has gone. There are 14 modules today, but the number isn't really the point — the point is that they work together. We have also built CoreStack around the places where our customers actually operate: ZRA Smart Invoice, statutory payroll, mobile money and local accounting requirements.
AI
Not another chatbot sitting in the corner of a dashboard. Agents that hold a conversation over WhatsApp, prepare quotations, work through insurance processes, reconcile financial information and turn a conversation into a working website.
There is a lot of noise around AI right now. We're less interested in the noise and more interested in what happens when you give a business back three hours of someone's day. That's the part we're working on.
Custom software
Web and mobile applications, internal systems, APIs, integrations and cloud infrastructure. For processes that are genuinely a business's own, or systems that simply aren't available yet.
CoreStack ERP doesn't solve every problem, and we don't pretend it does. We stay around after launch, because once real people start using software every day, that's when you find out what it really needs to become.
CompagnonsFirst, we understand howthe business actually works.
We ask a lot of questions before we build anything. How does a sale happen? Who approves a purchase? When does stock move? How are people paid? Where does the transaction hit the accounts? Those details matter more to us than starting with a beautiful screen.
- First, we understand how the business actually works
- How does a sale happen? Who approves a purchase? When does stock move? How are people paid? Where does the transaction hit the accounts? What happens when something is reversed? Those details matter more to us than starting with a beautiful screen.
- We put working software in people's hands
- We don't like disappearing for six months and coming back with a finished system nobody has actually used. We build, release, listen and improve. A working module being used by ten people teaches us more than another month discussing it in a meeting.
- We support what we build
- We stay responsible for the systems we ship. Businesses change, regulations change, teams grow, volumes increase. Something that worked perfectly at one scale needs to work differently at another. Our work doesn't stop at deployment.
- We build for the conditions we're actually in
- What happens when the connection is poor, when month end is busy, when hundreds of transactions arrive together, when a tax requirement changes, or when someone needs help while payroll is being processed. Those aren't edge cases. They're part of running a business here.
Two markets,understood properly.
Zambia
CoreStack started in Zambia. A lot of what the platform is today came from building alongside Zambian businesses and solving the problems we encountered with them. Accounting, payroll, ZRA Smart Invoice, mobile money, inventory and the way businesses actually operate here have all influenced the product.
South Africa
Our second market, approached the same way: understand the local requirements properly, build them into the platform and support the businesses using it. Two markets understood properly are more useful than twenty country names on a website.
We would rather be genuinely useful in two markets than listed in twenty. Each one we enter, we learn its filing rules properly before we sell anything into it.
A few thingswe care about.
Every one of these is something you could hold us to, and notice if we broke.
The numbers have to be right
You can forgive a lot in software. You cannot forgive the wrong payroll, the wrong stock balance or accounts you cannot trust. CoreStack handles information people use to make real financial decisions. We treat it that way.
Tell people the truth
If something will take three months, say three months. If it is expensive, say it is expensive. If there is a limitation, explain it before it becomes a problem. And if we don't think something should be built, we'll say that too.
Stay around
Launching is the easy part. The real test comes six months later when the database is bigger, the staff have found every shortcut imaginable and the business wants the system to do things nobody thought about during implementation.
Build for Monday morning
Not just the sales demo. Monday morning when everyone logs in. Payday. Month end. Stock take. Audit week. The afternoon the internet becomes unreliable. That's the software we're interested in building.
We're still buildingCoreStack.
We have been doing this a long time, and there is still a lot we want to build. The ERP keeps getting deeper. We're bringing more automation into the platform. AI is changing what we can remove from people's daily workload. And every new business we work with shows us another process that could be better.
Technology has changed enormously since we started. The problem we're trying to solve hasn't. Too many businesses still have people copying information between systems, fixing spreadsheets and reconciling things that should already agree.
We think businesses deserve better tools than that. So we keep building them.