Why we are building Hela
Because most management software is written for a company that does one thing, in one country, with one currency.
The problem we watched up close
In Central Africa, a trader who succeeds does not open a second identical shop: they open a restaurant, then a bar, then rent out rooms. Each activity has its own rules, rhythm and stock. None of them fit the same model.
Alongside that, dollars buy and francs sell, the rate moves every week, and the supplier sends their invoice as a voice note. The tools on the market assume the opposite: one trade, one currency, a stable rate, structured documents.
So the notebooks stay, the spreadsheets multiply, and on the 15th nobody can say what the whole thing earned. Hela is built for that ground, not the one next door.
What we will not trade away
Money is an integer
Every amount is stored in cents with its currency. No floating-point rounding hides in a total that commits your cash.
A past figure stays put
The exchange rate is frozen on each entry. Correcting today's rate never rewrites last month.
Legible before pretty
One colour in the charts, aligned figures, documents that print in black and white. A report reads on a phone at the market as well as on a desk.
Your data stays yours
Full export at any time. No proprietary format, no hostage-taking on the way out.
Each company in its own database
Your data does not share a table with another merchant's: every company gets its own PostgreSQL schema, isolated from the rest.
Everyone sees what concerns them
The cashier takes money without seeing the margin, the accountant reads without taking money. The role decides, screen by screen.
Hela now runs on a real API and a real database: each company gets its own PostgreSQL schema, sales, till, stock and treasury are recorded for good, and plan limits are enforced. The till sells without a network and sends when it returns, alerts and reminders go out by e-mail, and you can write to us from inside the app. What is left: paying for a subscription online. We would rather say so than let you find out.
Want to talk it through?
If you run several businesses and recognise your daily life in the above, your opinion interests us more than a filled-in form.