The challenge
Entas Energy is based in Lagos, Nigeria, and works across Africa. Its business covers energy advisory, gas project development (including liquefied petroleum gas and natural gas projects) and energy market data and trading, with a stated focus on clean cooking, lower-carbon transport and electricity access.
A company with this mix of activities has business-system needs that differ from a typical product distributor:
- Project-based work. Advisory and development projects need budgets, time and cost tracking, milestones and billing linked to the project, not just to the customer.
- Trading and contracts. Buying and selling commodities or services involves contracts, counterparties, currencies and settlement terms.
- Multiple currencies and jurisdictions, because clients, suppliers and projects sit in different countries.
- Market information that the team collects and shares, which needs a clear home rather than scattered files.
- A small head office that still needs clean accounts, approvals and reporting for investors and partners.
What we implemented
Promatics delivered business systems work for Entas Energy. The original summary of this engagement recorded Entas as a Promatics client but did not describe the platform or scope in detail, so we do not list modules or deliverables here.
For organisations with Entas's profile, Promatics typically works with Prometheus, our ERP built on ERPNext, which includes project and task management, accounting, sales, purchasing, CRM and human resource management, and connects it to the other systems the business already uses through system integration.
Results
We have not published measured outcomes for this engagement, and we do not add figures after the fact.
What this means for your organisation
Nigerian and West African energy consultancies, project developers, clean-technology firms and commodity traders share many of these needs. The practical lessons:
- Make the project the unit of management. Link time, expenses, purchases and invoices to projects so that profitability is visible while the work is under way, not after it ends.
- Handle currencies properly. Contracts in US dollars or other currencies, with books kept in naira, need exchange-rate handling built into the system.
- Keep contract terms with the transactions. Counterparty, pricing and settlement terms should sit in the same system as the invoices they produce.
- Plan for investor, donor and programme reporting. Clean-energy work may involve development-finance or public funding programmes with their own reporting requirements, and sector rules from bodies such as NUPRC, NMDPRA and NCDMB may apply to your activities. A project-based ERP makes it easier to produce the cost evidence they ask for.
- Start small. A lean team can begin with accounting, projects and CRM, and add purchasing, inventory or trading functions as the business grows.
See our ERP implementation service and Prometheus ERP, or contact us to talk about your operation.