Yoco is an African technology company. As a market-leading payments platform, it helps thousands of businesses get paid, run, and grow. Yoco believes that by opening up more possibilities for entrepreneurs to be successful, it can help create more jobs and enable people to thrive. Yoco offers in-person and remote payments, point-of-sale, stock and staff management, and access to cash advances.
Yoco was recently honoured as one of the Top 3 Inspirational Youth-Founded Companies by the Brand Africa Award and has been consecutively listed among CNBC's top 250 innovative fintech companies worldwide. Yoco also ranks 18th in Africa and 5th in South Africa in the Financial Times Africa’s Fastest Growing Companies Report and has been named one of Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators 2021. Find out more about Yoco here.
“Yoco now isn’t just a card machine. It’s a whole platform for your small, medium, and even large business, where you can load your products online, your staff, set up tipping for people, and integrate to your website to take payments online. It’s a whole financial ecosystem.”
The business has grown rapidly to support hundreds of thousands of customers. With this fast expansion, however, came the need for robust systems and processes to help Yoco’s hundreds of employees work efficiently.
“When the business just started, it was a case of just doing whatever it takes to get the job done. Everyone was doing everything,” says Martin. “Now we’re at an interesting stage where we actually need a little bit more process and structure in order to support operating at scale.”
Technology plays a big part in creating a scalable structure to support Yoco’s growing operations. It moved from Xero to Oracle NetSuite in October 2023 to have greater functionality for a multi-entity organisation operating across multiple geographies, as well as developing processes across the finance function like automated internal controls.
When Yoco completed the switch to NetSuite, it still needed a way to manage its complex approval workflows. Their approval matrix involved 32 different people across the business and typical conditions, such as vendor, dollar amount, and various cost centres. As Yoco has grown, so too has the complexity of its approval processes, particularly as it operates in a highly regulated industry.
Yoco already used ApprovalMax when they were using Xero, so they simply changed their integration in ApprovalMax once they switched to NetSuite. With ApprovalMax, the team at Yoco is always able to automate complex requestor and approval workflows that map directly to its sophisticated delegation matrix so incoming bills are always signed off by the right people, in the right order, before they're paid. It’s easy to add and change workflows as the business continues to expand in future.
“ApprovalMax empowers you to run things yourself. We don’t need to pay someone to set up the workflows for us – we can go in and fiddle with it ourselves. I trust it's going to work quickly and reliably to get a workflow up and running,” says Martin.
