The receipt moved from a machine to the cloud. Your ledger is still in a notebook.

A business-management app with one house rule: nothing reaches your books without being approved. Your people record expenses, purchases, stock movements and cash-float spending on their own phones; each record hangs — counted nowhere — until you or a manager you name says yes. Around that rule live customer and supplier ledgers, inventory, internal invoices, per-worker cash floats, projects and reports, for one company or several under a single login.

Yes — permanently free, not a trial on a timer. Paid tiers add more and their prices are shown in the stores. And a genuinely good note for Tanzania: Apple's Tanzanian storefront bills subscriptions in SHILLINGS — TZS, not dollars. Your books are in TZS and your subscription is too; no exchange-rate surprise on renewal day.

No — and in Tanzania this is the sentence that matters most. A VAT-registered business must issue its fiscal receipts and invoices through a TRA-approved Electronic Fiscal Device or, these days, a Virtual Fiscal Device in the cloud. i-shim is neither: it is not TRA-approved, it issues no fiscal receipt, and nothing it prints has standing with the TRA. What the app calls an invoice is an internal control document. Your EFD or VFD stays exactly where it is.

For the ledger the fiscal device was never meant to keep. The TRA moved the receipt from a machine on the counter to a device in the cloud — but the INSIDE of the business never got that upgrade: who spent what from the float, what left the store without a note, which customer's debt is quietly ageing. That ledger still lives in a notebook. i-shim is that upgrade — every entry approved by you before it counts.

An entry is written where it happens — a worker's phone, with photo and note. It exists, but touches no balance. It waits for the person you named: a yes posts it, a no sends it back with the reason, and the history keeps every name and timestamp. A notebook records what already happened; i-shim asks first.

Not by itself. The tax rate is a per-line entry, and the app's default field shows 20 — Turkey's rate, two points above Tanzania's 18 — because country presets exist only for Turkey and Azerbaijan. You type the 18; the VAT return and the TRA filings belong to your accountant.

Especially then. Below the Mainland VAT registration threshold no authority demands your books — which means the ledger is entirely the owner's decision, and the owners who keep one grow on numbers instead of memory. The threshold decides who else gets a copy; it never decided whether the copy is worth keeping.

Honestly: not yet, not properly. Swahili in i-shim is a draft — 2,069 of 11,777 strings, about 18% — while English is complete at 100%, and the picker does already list «Swahili (Tanzania)» for the day the draft grows up. A business that works in English runs fully today; a Swahili-first crew will meet English screens, and we would rather tell you that here than let the app tell you later.

It records, it never moves. A payment through M-Pesa, Tigo Pesa or Airtel Money is entered like any other movement — amount, counterparty, purpose, author, approver. No wallet connections, no transfers initiated, no money held.

No. Attendance, hours, advances and per-worker floats are recorded as clean, approved input — but NSSF contributions, PAYE and severance stay with your accountant. What they receive from i-shim is simply better raw material than a notebook ever was.

Ten, and all ten are spelled correctly — the third fully clean catalogue in this series: Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, Mwanza, Arusha, Mbeya, Morogoro, Tanga, Zanzibar, Kigoma, Tabora. What is missing is the administrative layer: none of the thirty-one regions exist in the app. Logged as a defect; free-text fields carry you meanwhile.

Yes — several companies and several workplaces under one login, each with its own books, team and approval rule. A shop in Dar, a depot in Mwanza and a farm near Arusha stay separate without three subscriptions.

On servers in western Europe — not in Tanzania. If your own policy requires in-country hosting, i-shim will not satisfy it today; better read here than discovered later. Access is per-user and role-based, and every approval carries its author's name.

No — cloud-first, a connection is required, and there is no offline entry that syncs later. Where coverage thins out, that is a real limit, stated plainly.

iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and any modern browser — one account, the same books everywhere, built for the phone first because that is where a Tanzanian owner actually stands.

Honestly: Zoho Books — widely used by Tanzanian SMEs — plus TallyPrime, Sage, QuickBooks and local suites like VISION connect to the TRA's VFD and issue compliant fiscal documents; i-shim does not, and for fiscalisation you need one of them regardless. i-shim's ground is the other half: mandatory owner approval before anything enters the books, capped per-worker cash floats, and several companies in one login. Most Tanzanian businesses will run i-shim beside a VFD channel, not instead of one.

Through exports: XLSX and CSV, protected by a period lock so a closed month cannot shift afterwards. We file nothing with the TRA and there is no direct import into Zoho, Tally or Sage — your accountant keeps their tools and receives already-approved records instead of a shoebox of paper.

App Store, Google Play or the browser — no dealer, no installation project, no consultant. Create the company, invite the team, name who approves what. The first pending approval usually reaches the owner's phone the same day.

It is not an EFD or VFD and issues no fiscal receipt, does not compute the VAT return or NSSF/PAYE, does not connect to mobile-money or bank accounts, does not work offline, does not host data in Tanzania, is not yet properly in Swahili, and has no online store or POS. Read it here, not in week two.