Umbra ERP: quoting, invoicing, payments and payroll in one system

What Umbra ERP is

Umbra ERP is a modular business platform. Each app is activated separately and priced per user, so a two-person trading company and a fifty-person manufacturer pay for different things. It covers the quote-to-cash path (quotes, sales orders, invoices, payments, receipts, credit notes, statements and aged receivables), CRM (leads, contacts, deals and activities), payroll and HR, procurement, inventory, projects and accounting with a general ledger.

It is built for operators in markets where the business runs on WhatsApp, where more than one currency is in daily use, and where the tax authority has specific and changing requirements. Umbra carries legal entity types for 52 countries, and the interface is available in 21 languages.

The built-in assistant

Umbra has a built-in assistant that works in two modes. In conversation it can search and act across sales, finance, CRM, HR, marketing, procurement and inventory. Separately, you can paste a raw customer conversation, a photographed order or a PDF, and it will read it and propose records to create.

The paste flow runs as four separate stages: extract, check, propose, execute. The checking stage is deterministic database matching, not a guess by the language model: it matches an existing customer on exact email, on the last nine digits of a phone number, and on a fuzzy name score, and it looks for open quotes raised for that customer in the last 90 days, so a repeat enquiry does not silently become a duplicate customer. It never invents a price; catalogue prices are re-read from the product record at the moment of execution. Proposals expire after 24 hours and nothing is written to your data until you explicitly confirm. Replying "ok" or "thanks" does not count as consent.

What Umbra does

• An assistant that confirms before it acts. Paste a customer conversation and Umbra extracts the facts, checks them against your existing customers, leads and open quotes, and proposes what to create. You confirm or decline. It can propose a customer, a lead, a quote, quote lines, invoice lines and a follow-up message.
• Conversational operation across the business. Seven assistant profiles (sales, finance, CRM, HR, marketing, procurement and inventory) can search records, read statements and take actions in their own area, from raising a quote to recording a bill payment or approving a leave request.
• Quotes, invoices, credit notes and statements. The full quote-to-cash path: quotes, sales orders, invoices, credit notes, customer statements and an aged receivables report, each with its own currency.
• Card and EcoCash pay links on invoices and quotes. An invoice or a quote can carry a link the customer clicks to pay by card or by EcoCash. Settlement is confirmed by Umbra querying the gateway itself, and the amount and currency must match before the document is settled. Pay links are switched on per account by an administrator.
• A receipt raised automatically on payment. Recording a payment mints a receipt without being asked, whether the payment came from a card settlement, an EcoCash settlement, marking an invoice paid, marking a quote paid, or the assistant doing it for you.
• Client self-service details links. A quotation email can carry a private link where the client fills in their own legal name, address, TIN, VAT number and billing emails. The answers merge onto the customer record; a blank field is treated as unanswered and never wipes what you already hold.
• Recurring invoices and recurring quotes. Schedules run weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or annually, pinned to a day of the month and handling month-ends. Both can generate and email the document automatically on the due date.
• Payroll for Zimbabwe and South Africa. Zimbabwe payroll calculates PAYE, NSSA, WCIF, ZIMDEF and the 3 per cent AIDS levy, and produces the P9 employee certificate and the ITF16 employer annual return. South African payroll calculates PAYE with the primary rebate, UIF for employee and employer against a monthly cap, and SDL. Payslips are generated as PDFs and emailed on approval.
• More than one currency, with exchange rates you can defend. Every quote, invoice, receipt and sales order carries its own currency. Exchange rates are fetched automatically from an official rate API first and Stanbic Bank second. Parallel-market quotes are refused outright, no midpoint is ever computed, and a rate that is already stale when fetched is rejected. Umbra never sums amounts across currencies.
• ZIMRA fiscalisation support. Umbra connects to a FiscalCloud virtual fiscal device. You configure the device, open and close fiscal days, and submit invoices, credit notes and debit notes singly or in a batch. Each invoice shows its fiscal status.
• More than one business on one login. One account can run up to 25 separate businesses, including parent and subsidiary structures, each with its own records, currency and payroll configuration. You switch between them without logging out.
• A public API, webhooks and an MCP server. An API-key authenticated REST API covers 87 endpoints with per-scope permissions, webhooks fire on customer, invoice, quote, payment, lead and contract events, and an MCP server exposes 31 tools so an AI client can operate your Umbra data directly.

Apps

Apps are 10 US dollars per user per month each, with a few priced lower, and you activate only the apps you use. Cloud hosting is included. Setup and training is a once-off 50 US dollars plus 10 US dollars per person trained.

• Sales. Quotes, sales orders, invoices, credit notes, price lists and commissions.
• Finance. Payments, receipts, bills, expenses, budgets, journals, the general ledger, balance sheet and income statement.
• CRM. Leads, contacts, companies, deals, pipelines, activities and lead scoring.
• People & HR. Employees, payroll, payslips, leave, departments and recognition.
• Procurement. Vendors, purchase orders, requisitions, RFQs, goods receipts and three-way matching.
• Inventory. Products, stock and catalogue management.
• Projects. Project tracking against budgets and time.
• Time & Attendance. Shifts, clock-ins and attendance records.
• Contracts. Contracts with electronic signature collection.
• Marketing. Campaigns, segments, email templates and campaign analytics.
• Assets. Asset register with QR-code lookup.
• Academy. Courses, enrolment and a learner portal.
• Helpdesk. Support tickets.
• Manufacturing. Production and bills of materials.
• Quality. Quality checks and non-conformance tracking.
• Documents. Document storage and tracking.
• Workflow. Automation across modules.
• Reports. Reporting across every activated app.
• Productivity. Day-to-day task and note tools.
• Platform. Account, users, roles, API keys and webhooks. Included at no per-user charge.

Where Umbra is used

Umbra is built for African operating conditions and carries the specifics: Zimbabwe PAYE, NSSA, WCIF, ZIMDEF and the AIDS levy in payroll; South African PAYE, UIF and SDL; ZIMRA fiscalisation support through a virtual fiscal device; automated exchange rates that refuse parallel-market quotes; and legal entity types for 52 countries including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

Guides

Practical guides to invoicing, payroll and tax compliance in the markets Umbra serves.

• ZIMRA fiscalisation and your invoicing system (Zimbabwe): What fiscalisation actually requires, who it applies to below the VAT threshold, what changes on the invoice itself, and how a virtual fiscal device fits an existing accounting system.
• Running payroll in USD and ZWG (Zimbabwe): Separate USD and ZiG tax tables, the 3 per cent AIDS levy, NSSA ceilings, the 10th-of-the-month deadline, and the ZIMRA rule that decides which table a mixed-currency salary uses.
• From a WhatsApp order to a paid invoice (Zimbabwe): The five places a Zimbabwean SME loses an order between the WhatsApp message and the bank account, and how to close each one without hiring an admin.
• The US$25,000 VAT threshold (Zimbabwe): When a Zimbabwean business must register for VAT, what the 15.5 per cent standard rate does to your pricing, what a fiscal tax invoice must carry, and the US$10 floor below which one is not required.
• SARS PAYE, UIF and SDL (South Africa): What a South African payroll run has to calculate: the 2027 tax year brackets and rebates, UIF at 1 per cent each side against the R17,712 ceiling, and SDL with its R500,000 exemption.
• POPIA and your customer records (South Africa): The responsible party and operator split most small businesses get wrong, what it means for a CRM and a cloud invoicing system, and the practices that keep a customer database defensible.
• Invoicing through load-shedding (South Africa): What actually stops working when the power goes: the honest split between what a cloud system solves, what a phone solves, and what nothing solves.
• What a valid South African tax invoice must contain (South Africa): The full tax invoice, the abridged invoice and the R50 floor, why a missing VAT number costs your customer the input deduction, and the fields worth automating.
• Invoicing in two currencies without breaking your books (Africa): Why mixed-currency totals are meaningless, which rate to use and when, why a parallel-market rate must never enter your ledger, and how to keep receivables readable in both currencies.
• Why business AI should ask before it acts (Africa): The case against autonomous agents in your ledger: what goes wrong when a language model writes directly to your records, and what a checked, confirmed pipeline looks like instead.
• Running a business out of a WhatsApp inbox (Africa): Why WhatsApp wins as the customer channel across Africa, exactly where it fails as a system of record, and how to keep the channel while fixing the record.
• Running several businesses without mixing the books (Africa): Group structures, subsidiaries and side ventures: what has to stay separate by law, what can safely be shared, and the reporting that breaks when tenancy is done badly.

All Umbra ERP guides

Frequently asked questions

Contact

Email [email protected]. API documentation is at https://docs.umbraerp.com.