Inside the Build: How a Nigerian startup is approaching the NRS e-invoicing mandate

…As medium-sized businesses prepare for mandatory e-invoicing in 2026

…small team bets that compliance software built specifically for Nigerian requirements will find a market

From July 2026, Nigerian businesses with annual turnover between one and five billion naira must begin transmitting structured electronic invoices in real time to the Nigeria Revenue Service, with enforcement following from January 2027. Smaller businesses join the regime from July 2027.

The mandate, introduced under the Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025, routes invoices through the NRS Merchant Buyer Solution platform, where each transaction is validated before it is recognised for tax purposes.

For many businesses, the practical question is which software to use. Established platforms such as Sage, QuickBooks, and Xero are widely deployed and work well for companies whose accounting practices map onto the environments those tools were designed for.

Whether they fully reflect Nigerian statutory requirements, including the specific deductions and the new e-invoicing clearance flow, is a question businesses are now weighing as the deadline approaches.

ZetaFisc, a platform built by Zetacoms Technology Limited, is one of the Nigerian-built entrants targeting that gap.

The company was founded by three people with deliberately different specialisations: Fawekun Adeola Sunday, an accountant and business consultant with over a decade advising Nigerian businesses, who serves as Chief Financial Officer; Joshua Ajayi, a software engineer with a telecoms and enterprise software background, who serves as Chief Technology Officer; and Miriam Ajayi, a quality assurance engineer, who serves as Chief Executive Officer.

A division of expertise
The team describes a clear split. Adeola defines the accounting and compliance requirements, the statutory deductions, the tax treatment, and the rules an invoice must satisfy. Ajayi builds those requirements into the software. Adeola then verifies each implementation against what the law requires.

“The accounting logic comes from me,” Adeola said. “I specify exactly how a calculation or a filing should work, and Joshua implements it. Then I check it against what the regulations actually require before it goes anywhere near a customer. Nigerian businesses want to comply. The difficulty has been that the tools available were not built around the way compliance works here.”

Ajayi began building the platform before the e-invoicing mandate was formally announced. “My role is to take the requirements Adeola defines and make the software enforce them by default,” he said. “The engineering question is how to make correct behaviour automatic, so a business owner is not relying on memory or manual checks.”

How the e-invoicing flow works

On ZetaFisc, a business first registers with the NRS and obtains its credentials, then enters them into the platform once. After that, an invoice created in the system can be transmitted to the NRS Merchant Buyer Solution directly, either by clicking a send option or automatically if the business has enabled it, without leaving the platform. The integration is operational now, which the company argues allows businesses to test and adopt the process ahead of their enforcement date rather than at the deadline.

Beyond e-invoicing, the platform handles invoicing, payroll with Nigerian statutory deductions, payment vouchers, bank reconciliation, approval workflows, and tax reminders that calculate the amount due from a business’s own records.

It runs a tiered subscription model, from a free entry level up to enterprise plans.
Early traction, modest scale
ZetaFisc reports 29 active business tenants, 187 invoices and 245 payment vouchers processed, and paying customers across travel, media, automotive, and professional services. The numbers are small against Nigeria’s larger, better-funded fintech and accounting players, but they represent paying usage ahead of the mandate’s enforcement window.

One user, the owner of a travel business who asked not to be named, said the shift had reduced manual work. “Before, everything was on Excel and invoices went out on WhatsApp. Now the VAT is calculated for me and I can pull a report when I need one,” the owner said.

Whether platforms like ZetaFisc capture meaningful share will depend on execution, support, and trust, as much as on features, particularly as larger providers extend their own Nigerian compliance capabilities.

For now, the firm is positioning itself on specificity, software written around Nigerian requirements rather than adapted to them, and on being ready before the businesses it serves are required to be.

ZetaFisc is available at zetafisc.ng. Zetacoms Technology Limited is registered in the United Kingdom, with a corresponding registration in Nigeria under Zetacoms Limited.