There is a moment every African business knows, and almost none of them think of as a finance problem. A customer says yes, send me a quote. Someone opens a Word document, or a spreadsheet, or a template a colleague made two years ago. They itemise, they guess at a total, they export a PDF, they send it over WhatsApp. If the customer accepts, that number gets re-typed into an invoice somewhere else, in another tool, by another person. And the quote itself, the first financial commitment the business ever made on that deal, disappears into an inbox.
Bujeti, the Finance Control Centre for African businesses, has just launched Quotes, and it closes that gap. The entire quotation process now lives inside Bujeti, from the first itemised estimate to the moment the money lands.
With Quotes, a business can create professional, itemised quotations in minutes, route them for internal approval before they ever reach a customer, and send them by link, email, or WhatsApp for review. It can track whether a quote is pending, accepted, or declined, and see its acceptance rate at a glance. And when a quote is accepted, it converts into an invoice in one step, so the business gets paid instantly instead of starting the paperwork over.
That is the feature. The reframe underneath it is the more interesting story.
A quote is not a sales document. It is the first entry in the financial record
For most of the software African businesses use, the quote belongs to sales. It is a persuasion tool, a nicely formatted promise, and it lives wherever the salesperson keeps their files. Finance only meets the deal later, after the invoice, after the money moves, when it is time to reconcile what happened.
Bujeti argues that this is backwards. The quote is not the end of a sales conversation; it is the beginning of a money-movement chain that runs quote, invoice, payment, reconciliation, and record. Every link after the first one already lives inside Bujeti. Leaving the quote outside the system meant leaving the origin point of every deal ungoverned: no approval before a number went out the door, no visibility into how much revenue was committed but not yet closed, no clean line from the estimate a customer accepted to the payment that eventually arrived.
“Businesses have been treating the quote as marketing when it is actually the first financial decision they make on a deal,” says Cossi Achille Arouko, CEO and co-founder of Bujeti. “You commit to a price, a scope, and a timeline before anyone in finance is even looking. We pulled that decision inside the system so control starts where the deal starts, not three steps later when you are trying to reconstruct what you agreed to.”
Built inside the platform, not bolted onto it
Quotes is built the way every Bujeti product has been built: embedded, not added on. When a business quotes on Bujeti, it is working inside the same system where it already issues corporate cards, automates vendor payments, runs payroll, and separates tax at the point of transaction with the Tax Vault. The approval logic that governs a payroll run governs a quote. The acceptance that closes a quote opens an invoice without a hand-off. Nothing is re-keyed, and nothing falls between tools.
This is the pattern the company has followed since day one. Corporate cards with real-time limits came first. Then vendor payments with full approval trails. Then tax management, which ring-fences VAT and withholding tax before those funds can be spent. Then a mobile app so control follows the business into the field, then payroll, the largest recurring outflow any company has. Each product closes a different hole in the same wall. Quotes closes the one at the very front, where revenue first gets committed.
“When the quote lives in the same system as your invoices, your payments, and your reports, the deal never leaves the record,” says Samy Chiba, co-founder and COO of Bujeti. “You can see what you have promised, what has been accepted, and what has been paid, all as one continuous line. That continuity is the whole product. It is what turns a pile of documents into a system you can actually run a business on.”
Why it matters beyond convenience
Only 15% of African enterprises use online accounting tools. The other 85%, the manufacturers, the agencies, the logistics firms, the professional-services shops, run on the patchwork: spreadsheets, bank portals, WhatsApp threads, and records that exist, when they exist at all, in the memory of whoever built the file.
The quote is where a lot of that invisibility begins. A business that quotes, closes, and invoices inside one system produces something it never had before: a structured, verifiable trail from customer interest to cash. That trail is what converts a business from invisible to bankable. It is the difference between a founder who thinks the pipeline is healthy and a finance lead who can prove it.
The company making the argument
Bujeti has been building toward this since 2022. Quotes is the newest chapter, and a fitting one. It brings the very start of a deal, the first number a business puts in writing, inside the system that will govern every step after it. The goal has never changed: to give every ambitious African business, whatever its size or stage, the toolkit and intelligence to operate with a CFO in the room.
Bujeti Quotes is available now. Existing users can access it directly from their dashboard. New businesses can sign up or book a demo at bujeti.com.
Bujeti is the Finance Control Centre for African businesses, backed by Y Combinator, with $2.5M raised from Entrée Capital, Voltron Capital, Kima Ventures, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi. Over 5,000 finance professionals across Nigeria and Kenya run their operations on Bujeti.
