Why we built Emiday
A note on why bookkeeping in Nigeria is broken, what we learned in the year before launch, and how we're approaching the AI accountant from a Nigerian founder's first principles.
Most founders we talk to in Lagos run two parallel businesses: the one their customers see, and the one their accountant sees. The first one ships products, hires people, and grows. The second one is a quieter, slower thing — half-completed spreadsheets, WhatsApp threads with a part-time accountant, a stack of paper receipts in the corner of the office, three different bank apps open at once.
The gap between those two businesses is where Emiday lives.
The hidden tax on every Nigerian SME
If you ask a Lagos founder how much their accountant costs, they'll quote you the monthly retainer — usually somewhere between ₦80,000 and ₦300,000. That's the visible cost.
The hidden cost is everything else. The hours they spend each month sorting receipts. The Sunday evenings catching up on books. The penalty for the VAT return that was filed three days late because the accountant was slow getting back. The bank statement that was downloaded but never reconciled because it was 4am and the office was quiet and there was no time during the day.
We measured it on ourselves first. Even on a small business with predictable cash flow, bookkeeping was eating ten to fifteen hours a month between the founder and a bookkeeper. Half of that was data entry. The other half was waiting for the data entry to finish.
That number was the brief.
Why now, and why AI
Nigerian SMEs have been served, generously, by a generation of accounting tools — QuickBooks, Sage, Zoho. They all work. None of them feel built for here. They expect bank feeds that don't exist, currencies that aren't naira, tax codes that don't apply, support hours that overlap with North America rather than West Africa. So they get adopted, then quietly abandoned, then replaced by Excel.
We wanted to start from the local context — Paystack and Flutterwave settlements, FIRS and LIRS deadlines, NSITF and Pension contributions, GTBank and Zenith feeds — and build outward. Not adapt a tool that lives somewhere else.
The AI part isn't where the value is, exactly. The AI is what makes it possible to ship something that feels like having a sharp finance lead in the room without paying one. You can ask "what's my net this month?" and get the answer with the line items behind it. You can forward a Telegram receipt and have it land in your books in eight seconds. You can sleep on the 19th of the month without remembering that VAT is due on the 21st.
That's not a feature list. That's how we want it to feel.
What's next
We're early. The product can read your books, draft your taxes, and answer most of the questions founders actually ask. The next year is about depth: better understanding of every state's IRS, payroll for businesses with more than fifty staff, multi-entity for groups, white-label for accounting firms running on top of us.
If you want to come along for that — or push us on what we're getting wrong — we're at hello@emiday.io. Reply to anything we send you and a real person reads it.