EFRIS keeps the state's ledger. Who keeps yours?

i-shim is a business-management app with one organising principle: your books are YOURS, and nothing enters them without your approval. Your team records expenses, purchases, stock movements and cash-float spending from their own phones; every record waits — pending, touching nothing — until you or a manager you appoint approves it. Around that chain sit customer and supplier ledgers, inventory, internal invoices, per-worker cash floats, projects and reports, for one company or several in one account.

Yes — a permanently free tier, not a countdown trial. Paid tiers add more; their prices are shown in the stores. One honest note for Uganda: Apple's Ugandan storefront bills subscriptions in US dollars, not shillings — Apple's storefront policy, not ours. Your books inside the app stay in UGX.

No — and in Uganda this is the sentence to read twice. EFRIS, the URA's Electronic Fiscal Receipting and Invoicing Solution, fiscalises invoices AND retail receipts in real time, and it is mandatory for VAT-registered businesses — extended to twelve more sectors from 1 July 2025. i-shim is not integrated with EFRIS, is not fiscalised, and produces no e-invoice or e-receipt the URA would recognise. What the app calls an invoice is an internal control document. Your EFRIS channel stays exactly where it is.

EFRIS keeps the state's ledger — what you sold, fiscalised the moment you sold it. But the state's ledger is not your ledger. Who spent what from the float this morning, what actually sits on the shelf, which customer's debt is three weeks old, whether the fuel money matched the trip — none of that is EFRIS's business, and all of it is yours. i-shim is the owner's ledger: every entry approved by you before it counts.

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

Not by itself. A tax rate is entered per line, and the app's default field shows 20 — Turkey's rate, two points above Uganda's 18 — because country presets exist only for Turkey and Azerbaijan. You type 18 where it applies; the VAT return itself belongs to your accountant, and we compute no input-output offset.

Especially for you. Below the VAT registration threshold — UGX 150 million today, with the 2026/27 bills proposing a rise to 250 million, still a proposal as we write this — no authority demands your books at all. Which means the ledger is the owner's own decision. A business that knows its day in numbers grows on numbers; the threshold only decides who else gets a copy.

It records, it does not move. A MoMo payment is entered like any other movement — amount, counterparty, purpose, who recorded it, who approved it. i-shim does not connect to MTN MoMo or Airtel Money, does not initiate transfers and never holds money.

No. Attendance, hours, advances and per-worker cash floats are recorded as raw, approved input — but i-shim does not compute NSSF contributions, PAYE bands or gratuities. Those calculations belong to your accountant; what they receive from i-shim is cleaner input than a notebook ever gave them.

Ten, and — for once on these pages — all ten are spelled correctly: Kampala, Gulu, Lira, Mbarara, Jinja, Mbale, Masaka, Entebbe, Soroti and Fort Portal. What is missing is the administrative layer: no districts, no regions. That gap is logged as a defect; the fields accept free text meanwhile.

Yes — 100% coverage, 11,777 strings, nothing missing, and the language picker knows English (Uganda) specifically. Thirteen more languages ship alongside; an owner in Kampala 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 Kampala, a stall in Jinja and a transport side-business keeps them separate without three subscriptions.

On servers in western Europe — not in Uganda. If your own policy 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 — stated, not hidden.

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

Honestly: Uganda has grown an entire integration ecosystem — middleware platforms and connectors whose whole job is wiring invoicing software into EFRIS, plus EFRIS-compliant suites. i-shim has no such wire, and for fiscalisation you need one of theirs regardless of anything on this page. i-shim's ground is different: mandatory owner approval before anything enters the books, capped per-worker cash floats, and several companies in one account. Most Ugandan businesses that use i-shim will run it beside an EFRIS 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 URA and there is no direct import for QuickBooks, Xero or the EFRIS suites — your accountant keeps their tools and receives already-approved records instead of a bag of receipts.

Download from the App Store or Google Play, or open the browser version — 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 fiscalise EFRIS invoices or receipts, does not compute the VAT return, does not compute NSSF or PAYE, does not connect to mobile-money or bank accounts, does not work offline, does not host data in Uganda, and has no online store or POS. Better read here than discovered in week two.