Why we built Tora

Walk into the office of almost any compound in Addis Ababa at the end of the month and you’ll see the same thing. A thick ledger open on the desk. A receipt book with carbon copies. A phone full of photos of bank slips sent on Telegram, waiting to be matched against a statement. And someone at the window asking a simple question that takes far too long to answer: how much do I owe?

The people in that office work hard. The problem isn’t them. It’s that they’re running a small business, with hundreds of customers, recurring bills, shared costs and money coming in through three or four channels, using tools made for something much simpler.

We built Tora Property for them.

What we kept seeing

Before writing any code, we spent time with the people who run compounds and apartment blocks, and with the people who live in them. The same problems came up again and again.

• Bills take days to prepare. Service charges, water, parking: each month someone works through every unit by hand, and one mistake means a difficult conversation later.
• Payments are hard to trace. Cash at the window, bank transfers, telebirr. A resident says they paid last Tuesday; finding that payment means scrolling through chats and statements.
• Receipts get lost. When a dispute comes up months later, nobody can find the carbon copy.
• Owners and tenants get mixed up. Who pays the service charge, the owner or the person living there? It depends on the unit, and it changes when a tenant moves in or out.
• Residents are in the dark. Most people want to pay on time. They just don’t know exactly what they owe, what it’s for, or whether their last transfer arrived.

None of this is unusual. It’s what happens when a growing city’s homes are managed with paper.

What Tora does

Tora is two things: an office system for the company that runs the compound, and an app for the people who live there.

For the office, Tora keeps one record of every unit: who owns it, who lives there, which cars are registered, what was agreed in their contract. From that, the monthly bills almost make themselves. Service charges, water from the meter readings, parking for each registered car, each sent to the right person, owner or tenant. Before anything goes out, Tora shows what needs a second look: a unit with nobody to bill, a meter that wasn’t read, a charge without a price.

When someone pays at the window, the accountant records it and a numbered receipt is ready to print. When someone pays by bank transfer, they send their slip through the app, and the accountant confirms it against the statement before the bill is marked paid. If something was recorded by mistake, it can be reversed, but only with a manager’s approval, and the history stays.

For residents, the app answers that question at the window. It shows what they owe and what it’s for, where to pay, and every receipt they’ve ever been given. They get a message when new bills arrive and a reminder before the due date. Owners can see their unit’s bills even when a tenant lives there. And residents who don’t use the app still get their bills by SMS.

Built for how things work here

We didn’t want to take a system built for somewhere else and translate it. Tora is built around how compounds in Ethiopia actually work.

• Bank transfers and slips are normal, so checking a slip is a first-class step, not an afterthought.
• Amharic and English, side by side, in the resident app.
• Owners and tenants in the same compound, often paying different charges.
• Prices in birr, receipts with the amount written in words, and bills that match what the office already sends today.

Why “Tora”

Our name comes from the Tora hartebeest, an antelope found only in this part of Africa. Hartebeest live in herds, and while the herd grazes, one stands on high ground and keeps watch, so everyone else can get on with their day.

That’s the job we want Tora to do for a compound: keep an eye on the bills, the payments and the records, so the office can look after the people who live there, and residents always know where they stand.

What’s next

We’re starting here in Addis Ababa, working closely with the offices that manage compounds and apartment blocks, and improving Tora every week based on what they tell us.

On this blog we’ll share what we learn along the way: practical guides on billing and collecting payments, working with owners and tenants, and running a compound office with less paper. We’ll also post what’s new in Tora as it ships.

If you manage a compound or an apartment block, we’d love to show you Tora with your own units. Book a demo and we’ll walk you through it.