The GRA approves your invoices before they exist. Who approves your expenses?

i-shim is a business-management app built around one idea: nothing enters your company's books until the owner — or a manager the owner appoints — approves it. Expenses, purchases, stock movements and cash-float spending are recorded by your team from their own phones and wait, inert, for your decision. Around that approval chain sit customer and supplier ledgers, inventory, invoicing as internal control documents, per-worker cash floats, projects and reports — for one company or several, in one account.

Yes — a permanently free tier, not a trial with a countdown. Paid tiers add more and their prices are shown in the stores. One honest note for Ghana: Apple's Ghanaian storefront bills subscriptions in US dollars, not cedis — that is Apple's storefront policy, not ours. Your books inside the app stay in GHS.

No — and in Ghana this is the single most important sentence on this page. Ghana runs a clearance model: since January 2026 every VAT-registered business must issue its invoices through the GRA's E-VAT system, where the invoice is validated by the authority BEFORE it reaches your customer. i-shim is not integrated with E-VAT, is not certified by the GRA, and produces no cleared XML or JSON invoice. What the app calls an invoice is an internal control document. Your E-VAT channel — the GRA portal or a certified system — stays exactly where it is.

For the other half of the discipline. Ghana's state already decided that an invoice needs approval before it exists. i-shim applies the same logic to the inside of your company: an expense needs YOUR approval before it enters the books. The E-VAT system watches what you sell; nobody watches what your crew spends between Monday and Friday — until every cedi has to pass through your phone first.

The spine of the product. Someone on your team records an expense, a purchase or a stock movement from their own phone. That record sits outside your balances — pending — until you or a manager you appoint approves it. Rejections travel back with a reason, and the whole history keeps names and timestamps. Nothing enters your books uninvited.

Here is a strange, honest coincidence: the app's default tax-rate field shows 20 — Turkey's rate — and since 1 January 2026 Ghana's unified effective VAT rate is also 20% (15% VAT plus NHIL 2.5% plus GETFund 2.5%, now on one base with the levies deductible as input tax under Act 1151). The number on your screen happens to be right. But i-shim does NOT split the 20 into its components, does not compute input-tax credit and files nothing with the GRA. The rate is a per-line label; the VAT return belongs to your accountant.

Especially for you. Act 1151 raised the VAT registration threshold to GH¢750,000, so many small businesses now sit outside the VAT net entirely. For them no authority demands a ledger at all — which means the ledger is the owner's own decision. A shop that knows who spent what today, what is on the shelf and who owes whom grows on numbers instead of memory, threshold or no threshold.

It records, it does not move. Since April 2025 the 1% E-Levy on electronic transfers is gone — repealed — and MoMo is again the cheapest way money moves in Ghana. In i-shim a MoMo payment is recorded like any other: amount, counterparty, what it was for, who entered it, who approved it. The app does not connect to MTN MoMo, Telecel Cash or AirtelTigo, does not initiate transfers and never holds money.

No. i-shim records attendance, hours, advances and per-worker cash floats as raw, approved input — but it does not compute SSNIT contributions, PAYE bands or severance. Those calculations belong to your accountant or payroll bureau; i-shim hands them cleaner numbers than a notebook ever did.

Ten, from Kumasi and Tamale to Sekondi-Takoradi, Cape Coast, Tema, Koforidua, Sunyani, Ho and Wa — and here a confession we would rather make ourselves: the capital is stored as «Akra», the Turkish spelling, instead of Accra. The other nine are spelled correctly. There is also no region layer — none of Ghana's sixteen regions. Both are recorded as defects to fix; city and region fields accept free text meanwhile.

Yes — 100% coverage, 11,777 strings, nothing missing, and the language picker knows English (Ghana) specifically. Thirteen more languages ship alongside; a Ghanaian owner and a supplier abroad can run the same company each in their own language.

Yes. Several companies and several workplaces under one login, each with its own books, team and approval chain. A trader with a shop in Accra, a store in Kumasi and a transport side-business keeps them separate without three subscriptions.

On servers in western Europe — not in Ghana. If your own policy under Ghana's data-protection rules requires in-country hosting, i-shim will not satisfy it today; we say that plainly rather than let you discover it later. Access is per-user and role-based, and every approval carries its author's name.

No. i-shim is cloud-first and needs a connection; there is no offline entry mode that syncs later. Where coverage is thin, that is a real limitation — we state it rather than hide it.

iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and any modern browser — one account, the same books everywhere. It is built phone-first, because in Ghana the owner's office is wherever the owner is standing.

Honestly: if you need e-VAT emission, payroll runs or payments, Built — a strong Accra-born platform — and the GRA-certified invoicing systems do things i-shim does not, and for e-VAT you must use a certified channel anyway. i-shim's ground is different: mandatory owner approval before anything enters the books, per-worker cash floats with caps, and several companies in one account. Many businesses will run i-shim beside a certified channel, not instead of it.

Through exports: XLSX and CSV, protected by a period lock so a closed month cannot shift afterwards. We file nothing with the GRA and there is no direct import for QuickBooks, Zoho Books or the certified e-VAT systems — your accountant keeps their tools and receives already-approved records instead of a carrier bag of receipts.

Download from the App Store or Google Play, or open the browser version — there is no dealer, no installation project, no consultant. Create the company, invite the team, set who approves what. Most owners see the first pending approval on their phone the same day.

It does not issue or clear GRA e-VAT invoices, does not compute the VAT return or split the unified 20%, does not compute SSNIT or PAYE, does not connect to mobile-money or bank accounts, does not work offline, does not host data in Ghana, and has no online store or POS. We would rather you read that here than discover it in week two.