“We used to look for our entries. Now we look for our margin.”

— Administrative Director, 28-employee SME

Background

The SME — which we will call “Distri-Sud” for confidentiality — operates a food distribution business from Douala, supplying around fifty retail outlets across the Littoral and Centre regions of Cameroon. 28 employees. Annual revenue around 800 million XAF. Before SynkriaOps, the company ran its accounting on three Excel spreadsheets: one for purchases, one for sales, one for cash flow.

The 2024 fiscal year had been delivered to the accountant 6 weeks past the closing date, and the internal team had spent 22 person-days reconstructing the bank movements from November-December 2024.

What changed

The move to SynkriaOps took two months between January and February 2026, with a manual import of the 2025 fiscal year (5,200 entries imported via the migration wizard) before a definitive switch to fiscal 2026 on March 1st.

Three concrete habits changed:

  1. Supplier invoice entry via OCR. The administrative team photographs invoices upon receipt, OCR extracts amounts, dates and suppliers; visual review takes 30 seconds per document instead of 4 minutes of re-entry.
  2. Continuous bank reconciliation. Statements from the three banks are imported at the start of each week; reconciliation with entries flows continuously instead of being a marathon session at month-end.
  3. Real-time P&L visibility. The administrative director reviews gross margin by product category every Monday — impossible before because Excel only aggregated at year-end closing.

The numbers

  • 1,700 monthly entries on average across 2026
  • 2025 fiscal year delivered in D+4 to the firm (vs D+42 in 2024)
  • 0 OCR data entry errors flagged on the first 600 supplier invoices (net extraction rate: 100%, but 100% human validation maintained)
  • 3 minutes per day to validate OCR documents (8× reduction in accounting time spent on this task)

What did not change

Let us be honest: the quality of the initial chart of accounts remains critical. SynkriaOps does not invent your 411###### sub-accounts or your analytical cost centers. If your internal nomenclature is fuzzy, the tool will not clarify it — it will simply make it faster to use.

The Distri-Sud team spent two weeks cleaning up their chart of accounts before the switch. That work, more than the software, explains the D+4.

What comes next

The company is currently testing 90-day cash flow forecasting and is considering activating automatic reminders on its 30 largest 411###### client accounts. The Orange CM Mobile Money feature is on hold — the operator has not yet delivered sandbox credentials on the CEMAC side for their merchant ID.

This testimonial was collected in April 2026. The company name is anonymized at its request but the figures have been verified against source documents.