What is SBB?
Smart Business Book is a real-time, all-in-one business management and accounting system. One place to run the whole business — the money, the stock, the people, and the paperwork that proves it all happened.
Three words carry the weight:
Real-time. Nothing waits for a batch or a month-end. Ring up a sale and stock falls, cash rises, the ledger posts and your reports change in the same moment. Balances are what you actually hold right now, not what you held when someone last did the books.
All-in-one. POS, inventory, invoicing, payroll and HR, tax, budgeting, forecasting and reporting are one system sharing one set of numbers — not separate tools you reconcile against each other and hope agree.
A real accounting system. Underneath the plain-language screens is proper double-entry bookkeeping, an audit trail on every write, period locking and a month-end close your accountant can sign. You record business events; correct accounting comes out.
Most small businesses end up with a drawer of receipts, a notebook, a phone full of mobile money SMS, and a spreadsheet somebody's cousin built. Each holds part of the truth and none of them agree. SBB replaces that with a single book that stays correct.
The idea in one page
Everything in SBB hangs off three things.
A business. Your book. It has a base currency, the modules you switched on, your team, and its own subscription. One login can own or be invited to several businesses and switch between them.
Money locations. Every place money actually sits — the cash box, the MTN MoMo wallet, the Airtel wallet, the bank account, the till float. Each has its own currency and its own running balance. Money never moves in SBB without leaving one location and arriving somewhere.
Transactions. Every sale, purchase, payment and transfer. Each one names a money location, a category, a date and an amount, and each one posts to the General Ledger as proper double-entry bookkeeping — whether it came from the POS, an invoice payment, a payroll run, or someone typing it in.
That last part is the point: you record business events, and correct accounting comes out the other end. You do not have to know what a credit is.
What it replaces
| Instead of | SBB gives you |
|---|---|
| A cash book and a notebook | Transactions and live balances |
| A separate POS machine | Point of Sale, web or offline Windows app |
| Stock counted on paper | Inventory with batches, expiry and low-stock alerts |
| Invoices in Word | Invoices with payment links and reminders |
| A payroll spreadsheet | Payroll that posts straight to the books |
| Excel pivot tables | Reports and the Explorer |
| Guessing next month | Forecast and What-If |
| Sending your accountant a shoebox | A real accountant role and a proper close |
What makes it different
It is built for how money actually moves here. Mobile money is a first-class payment rail, not an afterthought — you can take MoMo at the till, and pay for SBB itself with MoMo. Multi-currency is real: rates are frozen per transaction date, so last year's numbers do not change when today's rate moves.
It works when the internet does not. The web app queues entries offline. The Windows desktop app is fully offline-first: it keeps selling with no connection at all and syncs when you are back. Several tills in one shop keep each other's stock counts in step over your own network.
It is modular. A pharmacy needs batch and expiry tracking. A church needs fund accounting. A savings group needs rotating payouts. You switch on what you need and the rest stays out of your way. See Choosing your modules.
The AI reads your real books. Kiongozi is not a chatbot bolted on the side — it works from your actual transactions and tells you what needs attention today. You decide how much it is allowed to do.
Nothing is a black box. Every write is on an audit trail, deletions go to a recycle bin with reasons, and you can export everything whenever you want.
Who it is for
- Shops, supermarkets, pharmacies and hardware — counter selling, stock, expiry and batch control.
- Restaurants, bars and hotels — tables and tabs, kitchen dockets, splitting bills.
- Service businesses and consultants — invoicing, getting paid, expenses.
- Nonprofits, churches and foundations — fund accounting, donors and grants.
- Savings groups — Susu / ROSCA circles.
- Accountants and firms — a practice workspace for managing many client books at once.
Where to go next
- Ready to set up? Getting started
- Bringing data from another system? Migrate to SBB
- Want a plan? Your first week
- Just want the till? Download the desktop app