How to Implement ThatFiscal as Your Accounting System
Who this is for. You have decided to run your books in ThatFiscal rather than only fiscalise from something else. This guide is the order to do things in, and — more usefully — why that order, because almost every problem a new client has in month two is the result of capturing transactions before the things those transactions have to land on existed.
Before you start: what you will need in front of you
| Have ready | Why |
|---|---|
| Your last signed annual financial statements, or a trial balance as at your go-live date | This is where opening balances come from. Without it you are guessing, and a guessed opening balance is wrong in every report for ever. |
| Your bank statements as at the day before go-live | Opening cash and bank balances, to the cent. |
| A list of unpaid customer invoices and unpaid supplier bills | Your opening debtors and creditors. Without them, Money In & Out starts at zero and says you are owed nothing. |
| Your asset register, or the fixed-asset note from the statements | Cost, date of purchase and accumulated depreciation for each asset. |
| Loan agreements and the outstanding balance on each | A loan captured without its real balance understates your liabilities. |
| Your company logo, physical address, phone, VAT and TIN numbers, and banking details | These print on every invoice. ZIMRA requires several of them. |
| A stock count as at go-live, with cost prices | Only if you sell stock. Cost price, not selling price. |
The programme, in order
Activate the account and register the device
Your account is activated and your fiscal device is registered with ZIMRA — usually by SESPI or your reseller as part of onboarding, because a wrong attempt burns an activation key that is only valid for 24 hours. When it is done, your portal shows the device as registered and a fiscal day open.
Check before you move on: the Dashboard shows a device, a serial number and a green fiscal-day state. If it does not, stop here — nothing you issue will fiscalise.
Settings & Branding — everything that prints
Go to Settings & Branding and fill in all of it: trading name, physical address, phone, email, VAT number, TIN, logo, and your banking details (bank, branch, account name, account number, and swift code if you invoice abroad).
This is step two rather than step nine because it is printed on the face of every invoice you will ever issue, and a fiscal invoice cannot be reissued to correct a missing address. The platform refuses to fiscalise without a physical address and a phone number, which is deliberate — a tax invoice without them is not a valid tax invoice.
Check before you move on: raise nothing yet, but open Settings & Branding → Preview and read the letterhead as a customer would. Is the trading name the one on your bank account? Is the address the one on your ZIMRA registration?
Financial Settings — the rules the system will enforce
Billing Studio → Financial Settings. Set these now, because several of them change how a document behaves and cannot be applied retrospectively:
- Base currency — the currency your books are kept in. Everything else is measured against it.
- Official exchange rate (USD to ZWG) — the rate your business treats as official. Documents captured at a different rate produce an exchange gain or loss, reported under Financial Reports → Exchange Differences. Keep it current; a stale official rate makes every ZWG document look like a gain or a loss that is not real.
- Prices include tax — the Zimbabwean default is yes. Get this the wrong way round and every invoice quietly misstates output VAT.
- Payment terms and quote validity — these drive ageing and expiry.
- Numbering prefixes — invoice, quote and credit-note prefixes. Set them before the first document; numbers already issued are fiscal records and never change.
- Approvals — whether an invoice, a sales order or a purchase order needs a second pair of eyes before it is issued. Turn this on now if you want it at all: it is a control, and a control introduced after the habit has formed is resisted.
- Reminder ladder — when a late payer is chased, and in what words.
Chart of accounts, bank and cash accounts, and opening balances
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that cannot be skipped.
Chart of Accounts first. ThatFiscal ships a standard Zimbabwean chart; add the accounts your business actually uses and archive the ones it does not. Every report you will ever run groups by these codes, so an expense captured against "Other" in month one is an expense you cannot explain in month twelve.
Bank & Cash next. Create one account per real bank account, plus a Cash on Hand account if you handle notes. Give each its opening balance as at the day before go-live, taken from the bank statement, not from memory. A cash sale has to land somewhere; if there is no account, the sale is recorded and the money is in no account at all, and you can never reconcile.
Opening balances last, from your trial balance or last signed statements: debtors, creditors, stock, assets, loans, capital and retained earnings. Enter them dated the day before go-live.
Customers, vendors and items
Customers — name, display name (what actually prints on the receipt), VAT number and address. A registered buyer's VAT number belongs on the invoice; without it the buyer cannot claim the input tax, and they will ask you to reissue an invoice that cannot be reissued.
Vendors — name and TIN. Enter the TIN once, here: no TIN means no input VAT claim on anything you buy from them, and the platform fills it onto every bill and purchase order for you so you never type it again.
Items & HS Codes — every product and service you sell, with its HS code and tax rate. ZIMRA requires an HS code on every line of a fiscal invoice, and free-text lines are refused. Set cost prices on anything you want stock and cost-of-sales tracked on.
Asset Management — capture every fixed asset
Asset Management, one entry per asset: description, date of purchase, cost, and the depreciation basis. Where an asset is already partly depreciated, enter the accumulated depreciation as at go-live so the net book value in ThatFiscal matches your statements.
This feeds the Asset Register (which an auditor will ask for), the depreciation charge in your profit and loss, and the fixed-asset note on your balance sheet. It also feeds capital allowances in the ITF12C income-tax computation — so an asset never captured is tax relief never claimed.
Business Loans — capture every facility
Business Loans: lender, original amount, interest rate, term, repayment schedule, and the balance outstanding at go-live. ThatFiscal splits each repayment into capital and interest for you, so the interest reaches the profit and loss and the capital reduces the liability — which is the part hand-kept books almost always get wrong.
Include overdrafts, asset finance, director's loans and related-party balances. A liability you do not record does not stop existing; it just stops appearing on your balance sheet.
Projects — open every job you are running
If you work in contracts, construction, consulting, events or anything else where the question "did this job make money" matters, open a project for each one now: code, name, customer, contract value and retention percentage.
The reason this comes before you capture transactions is the only reason that matters: a cost is attributed to a job at the moment it is captured, and realistically at no other moment. The invoice form, the expense form and the bill form all carry a Project picker, and it takes one second to use. Going back through a month of documents to work out which job each belonged to is the task nobody ever does — and a project whose costs were never attributed reports a margin that is simply wrong.
Stock — count it, then load it
Only if you hold stock. Do a physical count as at go-live and load opening quantities and cost prices. Costing is weighted average: buy ten at $8 and ten at $12 and the cost of the next sale is $10.
Stock is allowed to go negative and is flagged rather than blocked — a sale that has already happened should be fiscalised on time and the counting problem fixed afterwards. Do not let that become the habit.
People and permissions
Invite your team under Users and give each the smallest role that lets them do their job. Financial Settings, opening balances and the chart of accounts are manager-level for a reason. If you turned approvals on in step 3, make sure at least two people can approve, or the first holiday stops your invoicing.
Salespeople are just names — adding one creates no login and costs nothing — and they feed the Sales by Salesperson report.
The dry run
Before go-live, do this once, end to end, with a real but small transaction:
- Raise a quote, convert it to an invoice, and fiscalise it. Check the QR code verifies on the ZIMRA site.
- Record a payment against it and confirm it clears from Money In & Out.
- Capture an expense with a receipt attached, on a project, in a foreign currency, and confirm it appears on the project's actuals.
- Record a supplier bill and pay it.
- Issue a credit note against the invoice and confirm both the stock and the VAT move back.
- Run the Profit and Loss, the Balance Sheet and the VAT position for the day.
If any of those surprises you, the time to find out is now.
Go live
From your go-live date, every sale is raised in ThatFiscal and every cost is captured in ThatFiscal. Running the old system "just for a while" in parallel is the most common way an implementation fails: two sets of books diverge within a fortnight, and the one people trust is whichever one is easier that day.
Close the fiscal day, every day. The Z report is a statutory record and ZIMRA expects it. It takes one click.
The first month-end — the one that proves it worked
At the end of your first month, do a full close. It will take longer than every month after it, and that is the point: anything set up wrongly surfaces here, while it is still one month of data.
- Reconcile every bank account. Import the statement, match the deposits, and make the closing balance agree to the cent.
- Review Money In & Out. Does what customers owe you match the invoices you believe are unpaid?
- Check the VAT position and file the VAT7 from it.
- Review Exchange Differences if you trade in more than one currency.
- Run the Profit and Loss and the Balance Sheet. Read them as a stranger would. An expense in "Other" is an expense you have not coded; a suspiciously round number is usually a figure somebody typed.
- Check every project's margin. A job with cost and no revenue usually means an invoice has not gone out.
The rhythm from then on
| How often | What |
|---|---|
| Daily | Raise invoices as sales happen. Capture expenses as receipts arrive. Close the fiscal day. |
| Weekly | Reconcile the bank. Send statements and let the reminder ladder chase late payers. Review purchase orders and bills. |
| Monthly | Full close as above. File the VAT7 in a VAT month. Update the official exchange rate. Review project margins. |
| Quarterly | QPD provisional tax from the ITF12C computation. Review the asset register for additions and disposals. |
| Annually | Year-end: stock count, depreciation, accruals and prepayments, then the annual financial statements and the ITF12C return. |
How long this takes
| Business | Realistic setup |
|---|---|
| Sole trader or small service business, no stock | Half a day |
| Retailer or wholesaler with stock | Two to three days, most of it the stock count |
| Contractor with live projects | Three to five days, most of it opening balances and project set-up |
| Multi-branch with several tills | A week, plus a day per lane |
These assume you have the documents in the checklist at the top. If you do not, the honest answer is that finding them is the project and the data entry is an afternoon.
The eight mistakes that cost the most
- Capturing transactions before the chart of accounts exists. Everything lands in a default code and has to be recoded one document at a time.
- No opening balances. Your first balance sheet is wrong, and so is every one after it until somebody fixes it.
- A go-live date in the middle of a month. Nothing reconciles against anything.
- Running the old system in parallel. Two sets of books, neither trusted.
- Not attributing costs to projects at capture. Unrecoverable in practice.
- Prices-include-tax set the wrong way round. Every invoice misstates output VAT, silently.
- Vendor TINs left blank. Input VAT you paid and cannot claim.
- Not closing the fiscal day. A statutory record you did not produce.
Where to go next
Billing Studio for the day-to-day screens. Items & HS Codes for getting your item master right. Credit Notes for fixing an invoice that is already fiscalised. Z Reports for closing the fiscal day. For Accounting Practices if you are doing this for clients rather than for yourself.