Getting e-invoicing live in African markets is still new territory for most global businesses. There aren't many teams who've done it dozens of times across Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, working through the data problems, integration decisions, and tax authority quirks that only surface in real implementations.

Fonoa's tax, engineering, and customer implementation leads have. In a recent webinar, they got together to share what they've learned from getting enterprise customers live across these four markets: what actually goes wrong, what saves time, and what they'd tell any company about to start.

Here are seven things worth knowing if you missed the live conversation.

1. Tax authorities are watching transactions in real time

The same thing is happening across Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, even though each country uses a different technical model. Carolina Silva, who leads e-invoicing tax research at Fonoa, put it plainly:

"Tax authorities want to be present at the moment of sale, either clearance, physical devices, real-time or near real-time reporting. Mistakes aren't discovered months later during audits. They're visible immediately, and they directly affect VAT recovery, deductibility, and cash flow."

Whether it's Kenya's centralized clearance, Zimbabwe's fiscal devices, or Nigeria's four-corner model, the point is the same: if the tax authority doesn't see it, the invoice may not be valid. Tax teams everywhere are adapting to this shift toward real-time compliance, and Africa is following suit with Europe and Latin America.

2. Data quality will make or break your go-live

Not architecture. Not API design. Data. Every panelist pointed to it as the number one reason implementations stall. Ralph van Coevroden, Fonoa's Director of Solution Architecture and Support, was direct:

"The most common errors are usually invalid tax ID numbers or address or name."

There's a bigger gap than most teams expect between "data that works in your ERP" and "data that passes a tax authority's real-time validation." Fields that were optional become mandatory. Formats that were loosely enforced become strict. And at scale, even small error rates add up fast. Antonio K, who leads Fonoa's e-invoicing engineering team, noted that a 0.001% failure rate across millions of weekly transactions means hundreds of blocked invoices.

For a deeper look at what validation actually involves across countries, see our developer guide to e-invoicing data validation.

3. Tax and engineering need to be in the same room

Ralph gave an example that got a knowing laugh from the audience:

"An engineer who has no tax background comes and sees an API, and without additional context, they will just send zero. And that will not necessarily be the compliant way to do things."

There's no such thing as 0% VAT in a vacuum. It's always exempt, or cross-border, or zero-rated for a specific reason, and many countries require an exemption code. If the tax team isn't involved in how the integration is built, a technically correct API call can still produce a non-compliant invoice.

Antonio reinforced the point:

"It's very hard to find a single person who can give you an answer to all of this. Because me, being an engineer, well, I'm not a tax person. We can build anything, but it has a cost."

That gap between tax knowledge and engineering execution is a big part of why how you organize your tax tech function matters so much.

4. E-invoicing turns your invoice flow into a two-way conversation

Ralph called out a change that many systems just aren't set up for:

"Historically, before e-invoicing, you could look at the invoicing flow as a one-way street. You get all the data you need in the ERP system, you generate the invoice, you send it out. That's it. With e-invoicing, you send the data, and you need to understand what the response is."

In Kenya, for instance, the tax authority sends back receipt numbers, signature numbers, and QR codes that need to flow back into your ERP. If your system was built for fire-and-forget invoicing, you've got some rearchitecting to do.

5. A single-country build can become multi-country technical debt

Antonio described a pattern he's seen repeatedly:

"If you start with just a single country in mind, you might make some decisions that will prevent you from building another one. Or you might get a false sense of confidence in thinking that you can build everything on your own, and then you hit a country where there's a four-corner model, where you need a certified provider, and now you have to rethink your whole system."

Ralph added:

"Engineers love to build. They hate to maintain. In the long term, the maintenance is the most difficult part for clients to keep up to track and up-to-date with any change in mandates."

For a single country or two, building in-house or going with a local provider can make sense. But once you're maintaining separate integrations across different schemas, validation rules, and transmission models, the cost starts compounding against you.

Limehome ran into exactly this across European markets before consolidating onto a single e-invoicing platform, reducing the time their engineering team spent on compliance work by 90%.

6. Accounts payable is becoming part of the mandate, not just accounts receivable

Most e-invoicing conversations focus on the outbound side: issuing invoices, clearing them with the tax authority, getting them to customers. But several African markets are extending obligations to the purchase side too.

Ghana already requires businesses to report domestic purchase data. Nigeria's four-corner model means receiving B2B invoices also requires routing through accredited access points. Ralph explained why this catches teams off guard:

"In most companies, the AP and the AR teams are so far apart, they don't even know each other. It's very different processes and systems. But when mandates are coming for both AR and AP, those teams need to start understanding how the other part of the business works."

If your current e-invoicing planning only covers the AR side, it's worth looking at what's coming on AP before you're caught flat-footed.

7. The first country takes months, the fifth takes days

Ralph shared specific timelines:

"The industry average is somewhere between 4 to 6 months. Fona’s average implementation is under 60 days for the first country. Second country, about 40, then 30. And we even saw companies that are able to go live within a week or less."

That acceleration only happens if your first integration is built with the next one in mind. If it's a one-off build for a single market, you're starting from scratch every time.

Start now, not when the deadline hits

E-invoicing mandates across Africa are live, the data quality bar is high, and getting tax, engineering, and finance on the same page early makes the difference between a smooth rollout and a scramble. Watch the full webinar recording for the complete discussion, including deeper dives into each country and live Q&A with the panel.