The gap we kept running into
Spend enough time with growing Sri Lankan businesses and the same conversation repeats. A bakery with four outlets. A garment subcontractor with two lines. A distributor with six lorries. All of them past the point where a notebook works, all of them short of the point where a global ERP makes sense.
Their options were narrow. Import an international ERP and pay to have somebody bolt EPF, ETF and APIT onto it — then pay again every time a rule changes. Or buy four or five local tools, one per problem, and accept that none of them talk to each other. Most chose the second, and then spent their evenings moving numbers between them by hand.
What was actually missing
It was never a feature list. Each of those tools did its own job adequately. What was missing was the joins between them:
- A sale at the counter should reduce stock — including stock that was produced this morning in your own kitchen.
- A production batch should cost what its ingredients actually cost, not what they cost when somebody last updated a price list.
- A rep's van should reconcile itself at day end, because the system knows what was loaded and what was sold.
- Payroll should already know who worked, because attendance is in the same system.
None of that is exotic. It just requires the modules to be one product rather than five integrations.
Built for here, not localised for here
The second thing we were deliberate about: statutory compliance is not a plugin.
EPF at 8% employee and 12% employer, ETF at 3%, APIT tables, the returns that have to be filed — these are core payroll behaviour in Sri Lanka, not a regional customisation. Software written elsewhere treats them as an edge case, which is why so many businesses end up maintaining a parallel spreadsheet next to their "complete" HR system.
The same goes for the parts of trading here that don't appear in imported software at all: van sales on credit, customer accounts settled weekly, receipts a customer expects to read in Sinhala or Tamil.
Where we are
Opernexa today covers POS and cash, inventory, manufacturing, HR and payroll, and distribution and field sales — as one platform, with the joins built in. It runs real businesses, including the multi-branch bakery in our first case study.
We'll use this blog for what we learn along the way: how businesses here actually sequence a rollout, what the numbers look like before and after, and what we get wrong. If you're somewhere in that gap we described, we'd like to hear how you're handling it.