Business Management App

A mobile tool that helps to manage micro, small and medium business of any type and any size.

Due to the usability of the economy and high levels of unemployment in most of African countries, most people have opted to start their small business as a way of survival. Most of these people are young people, woman and girls mostly. Sub-Saharan Africa alone has 44m micro, small and medium enterprises. By the year of 2017 there over 60,000 registered SMEs in Zimbabwe, which contribute up to 60% to the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Not to mention the unregistered SME's which are found on the 64.1% of the informal Sector in Zimbabwe which represents approximately $63 billion at GDP PPP levels. 

But these small business owners face a lot of challenges when operating their businesses. So, we did a survey and interviews to some of small business owners in our communities which includes vendors and small business owners, and they highlighted the following problems. There is poor management of the business; they are unable to scale up their business due to the availability of financial data, the inability to purchase equipment like point-of-sale instruments or to hire a professional accountant to handle their business for most business owners, most of these small business owners don't have the accounting knowledge and they find it difficult to do the accounting by hand, For those capturing there data manually, they will end up losing the books or those records  getting destroyed.  

Due to these problems, most business owners ended up quitting on their business and losing the little money they have to poor management, and we have come up with a solution to that. 

Due to these problems, we have come up with a solution of creating a business management mobile app. A business management App is a tool that will help these small business owners to manage their own business. The app can manage any business no matter how small it is. It comes with automate accounting tool, a point of sale, it is able to manage inventory, customers and suppliers. The user will be able to view their profits and loses reports for the business they are doing. The app has an AI model with calculates Sales Trends and give a simple report how your business has been performing towards a curtain period of time. By these we are giving people the opportunity of managing their own business with their mobile phones.

Own solution serves people who have businesses no matter how small it is or what kind of business they are doing, the unemployed people who have opted to start a small business for income to earn a living and also for people who have no idea of how to manage their small businesses. It also helps the people who have a little or no knowledge on the accounting aspect and they don't have money to hire professional accounting people. 

Me and my teammate have been enthusiastic in changing our community in the positive way through technology. In teams of our skills, we are Computer Science student and we have been involving ourselves in hackathons to enhance our skills. We were named the best innovators at the Zimbabwe Internation Trade Fair in 2022. Growing up, our parents' we vendors and we would grow experiencing the challenges they were facing while conducting their small business. In 2022, Zimbabwe held the Population and Housing Census, and we were part of the team which volunteered in that program. This gave us an opportunity to ask people on how they are living and what are the challenges they are facing in their everyday lives. It gave us a clear picture of people in Zimbabwe who are involved in small business and the challenges they are facing. We also got the opportunity to attend the UNESCO Africa-India Heckethorn which we also had the opportunity to interact with fellow Africans. We also had the opportunity to interact with them and ask them about how many SMEs are there in their community and what are the challenges they are facing. Through social media we would also interact with people around the world asking about the same issue. We use social media platform like WhatsApp and telegram. Since we did account in Ordinary level in High school, we would not face challenges while designing the up with the basic accounting logic. 

As I mentioned before, we volunteered as agents during Population and Housing Census in 2022. This gave us an opportunity to interact with people around the country and also understand how they are living and challenges they are facing. We used the opportunity to interact with a lot of people like vendors and those engaged in a lot of small business. We would ask they the main challenges they are facing and how can we solve those challenges. Before that, we were only working with people who are in our community. We would move around conducting interview and doing survey on what they want to solve their problem. And they would propose since they use their phones all the time, they would want something they could use with their phones and the majority of them have smart phones. We would also attend business forums and engage in online communities were small business owners would gather and discuss. With the help of Google Forms, we would invite Small Business Owners and Vendor to complete a small questionnaire, this was able to help us understand the challenges they are facing and what they would need to solve the issue.  

Well, most people or companies who focus in creating Accounting and business management tools don't consider solution for small business or small-scale vendor, they put much focus on creating solutions for big cooperation and businesses. Those solutions are complex to use and require a huge knowledge of accounting expertise to operate. Even for those who create mobile application to manages small business, their product is usually substandard and usually need internet connection to work. But we are giving a solution that works totally offline, you only need internet connection when you need to back up your data or if you have a lot of small business scattered across your community and need to get conneceted to you employees if you have them. And also, it's not a one stop app that offer their target users the opportunity to get all the Servies on one application. But when we were creating our solution, we made sure that the app carters all the Serivices the user's needs. This includes an automated accounting system, which makes the app easier to use for non-accounting people. Our solution also comes with a point of sale that help people like vendors and service providers to use. You can produce a receipt or create a quotation for a customer. Users can also be able to track their inventory and add inventory. Users will be able to keep track of their suppliers and also creditors, debtors and creditors. The App also come with an AI model that calculates sales trends for small business owners to keep Track of their progress and see which products and services are more profitable. This will help users expand their business. These are all service that are found in our solution, and it makes the users life easier and have a tool to manage their small business. With our solution, we are promoting the SDG number 8 of Decent work and economic growth to promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. We are doing this by encourage unemployed individual to start working for themselves with the skills they have giving them the tool which is reliable to anyone with a smart phone, and it won't matter what type of business you need to engage in or where you are.

Our impact goals for the next year are to make sure that everyone in a small business no matter what is, is able to use our solution in achieving the best out of their business. We want to promote young people, woman and girls to have any opportunity to work for themselves if they are unemployed. Since our app is capable of managing any business, we want to make an impact in industries like agriculture, after the farmer have harvested their crops, they will be able to manage how they will sale them and keep track of their customers. We want to put an impact in our economic growth by promoting people not to keep waiting for employment but be able to promote the creation of self-business no matter how small it is or what the business is about.

For our solution, we used Flutter and Dart. Flutter was for our UI/UX Design and Dart was for our Functionality. For our AI model for Sales Trends, we used Python. To integrate with flutter, we served our python (AI) model as a REST (API) service. We used FastAPI for this. After that, we then called the API in Flutter, which was able to return JSON and we were able to use the JSON in Flutter. For our database, we opted for google cloud since it's a zero-carbon-emission technology. We did this in support of creating a better world for all.  We are planning to create another version of the solution and use Decentralized data storage instead of central servers. By this, we will be able to create better security and privacy, and since it's cheaper than using central servers, we will be able to save money compared to centralized cloud storage options.

Since we have released our solution to people in our community, we currently have more than 3500 users. These are people who are currently conduction their small business in our community. These include Vendors, Capenters, farmers and small people who sell groceries in small tuck-shops in the community.  Statistically the are more than 13 000 SME's in our community which is Gweru, and our target is getting half of that as our user in the firs 4 months of 2023 which is 6500 users. Then after accomplishing our target, we are planning to move into the neighboring communities. Our main target is Harare, the capital City of Zimbabwe. Which has a huge number of SME's and people who are involved in the informal sector. They are a total of more than 18 500 registered SME's. Since we don't have the money for marketing our solution. We move around the community telling people about our solution and how it can be used. So, in Harare we would love to get at least 1/4 of the SME's who operate there which is 4 625 users so in total, we want to get more than 11 125 registered users by the end of 2023. This number can be more since we will be able to serve unregistered SME's again. 

To accomplish our goals in the next year we might face some financial and technical barriers. Since currently we have no one who is funding our work, we are finding it difficult to expand our solution to more people since we are moving around by ourselves promoting our solution. And to accommodate more people we need to expand our data storage server and be able to monitor the application with current users. Which is difficult and maybe be difficult too since we are only 2 people. Since we are planning to make another version of the app which runs on a decentralized data storage, we don't have the technical capabilities to finish the task in time. We have asked an expect to help us on the matter but due to lack of funds we are unable to hire him until it's done, which might limit us to finish the whole feature in time. Currently these are the barriers which currently exist for us to accomplish our goals. 

We haven't partnered with an organization so far, but we proposed to a partnership at one of the NGO's who sponsor SME's in Zimbabwe to use our mobile app to which individual is more eligible to get a funding for their Business. Since the Ministry of Women affairs, Community and Small and Medium Enterprises Development is the one responsible for giving woman and young people funding for their SME's in Zimbabwe, we submitted a proposal so that we would work with them too ensure that the funds they have given to small business is being used in the right way and also to encourage young people and woman to run their small business the efficient way using the Business management app for their business management. 

We will be using a subscription Business Model since we have a huge pool of customers and beneficiaries, these include vendors, tuck-shops owners, farmers, carpenters, plumbers, builders to mention a feel who are involved in small business because of unemployment. Our solution provides a great value to these users, once they have stated using our solution, they will start relying to our solution for their everyday business management. Most of these people use smart phones in their everyday lives for various duties, and having a management tool in their mobile smart phone would make it reliable o them for their management of their business. We will be providing our users with a variety of tools like an automated accounting system, a point of sale, they will be able to keep track of their inventory and get notification once it's about to get depleted. They will be able to keep track of their customers and suppliers, creditors and debtors. With the use of our AI model for sales trends, users will be able to get a sales trend report after a specified period of time. Users will be able to get our mobile application on Google play store. Due to the unavailability of a mac computer to publish our Mobile application for iOS user, we haven't published an iOS user's version yet.

Since we have started working on our solution, we started selling some small products on campus to fund our work. Though the money wasn't enough to cover everything. But since we have published our solution, we will be getting money from subscriptions for using the services of our solution, since we have a huge pool of customers, the money which will be paid will be so little that everyone in a small business will be able to meet the required amount. With the knowledge of user, we will be able to sell the data we will be gathering from our SME's to organizations that finds the data useful. These includes the sales trends report that will be provided to the user by our AI model. By this will be able to find our path to financial sustainability to bring money to fund money to our work and be able to cover expected expenses in the long run.