OHADA — SYSCOHADA
The seventeen OHADA countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, Niger, DRC, Senegal, Chad, Togo) share one accounting law: the revised SYSCOHADA (2017), a common chart of accounts and normalised financial statements.
It is not an e-invoicing regime — those are national: DRC, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Cameroon. It is the accounting these countries have in common, and Hela speaks it.
The chart of accounts
Hela projects every movement onto the SYSCOHADA chart (chart=syscohada, the default for a company in an OHADA country):
| Account | Role |
|---|---|
| 411 | Customers |
| 401 | Suppliers |
| 571 | Cash |
| 521 | Bank |
| 701 | Sales of goods |
| 706 | Services |
| 601 | Purchases of goods |
| 4431 | Output VAT |
| 4452 | Recoverable VAT |
The detail and the mapping by movement type: GET /companies/{id}/reports/exports/charts.
The statements
| Route | What it is |
|---|---|
GET /reports/ohada/ledger.csv?period=&chart=syscohada |
The ledger: every entry, debit and credit, by account |
GET /reports/ohada/balance.csv?period= |
The trial balance: each account's balance over the period |
GET /reports/exports/ledger?from&to&chart=syscohada |
The ledger as CSV for any software |
In the app: Finance → Reports → Accounting. Amounts are in the company's base currency; foreign-currency sales are converted at the rate frozen on the sale.
The minimal cash system
Very small businesses (turnover under the SYSCOHADA thresholds) fall under the SMT: a book of receipts and payments. Hela's treasury journal (Finance → Treasury → Movements) serves as such, exportable as CSV.
VAT
National rates are set per item or by default in Settings → Taxes: 16% in the DRC, 18% in Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Benin, Burkina, Mali, Togo; 19.25% in Cameroon. The VAT report (Reports → Taxes) gives output and input VAT per period for the return.
Accountants
A firm keeping the books in Sage, Odoo or another program gets the CSV export, or a read-only API key (reports:view, exports:create) to pull the ledger itself every month. See Accounting exports and Odoo.