Nigeria’s evolving tax framework is forcing a quiet but profound rethink of how businesses manage money.
The 2024 Withholding Tax (WHT) Regulations and the upcoming Nigeria Tax Act are doing more than raising compliance expectations—they are compressing the distance between payments, record-keeping, and tax remittance. What used to be end-of-year accounting clean-up is increasingly becoming a real-time operational requirement.
At a recent ecosystem event, Bujeti’s leadership framed this shift bluntly: compliance is no longer an administrative afterthought—it is becoming core financial infrastructure.
Founded to give businesses tighter control over spend, workflows, and visibility, Bujeti is now leaning heavily into what it calls “tax intelligence”—embedding tax logic directly into everyday financial operations.
From bank account to financial cockpit
Bujeti’s core positioning is intentionally distinct from traditional digital banking. Rather than optimising for transaction volume, the platform is designed around control: who can spend, on what, within which budget, and with what downstream tax consequence. CEO Cossi Achille Arouko describes the product not as a bank account, but as a financial “cockpit”.
“Banks are built for money to come in and go out,” Arouko said. “We’re building for everything that needs to be controlled before and after that happens.”
The distinction matters. Banks are structurally incentivised to maximise throughput. Bujeti is built to govern money flows—before approval, at execution, and after settlement.
Through a single dashboard, businesses can manage:
- Corporate cards and expense policies
- Budget allocation by team or department
- Invoicing and collections
- Multi-level approval workflows
Real-time visibility into liabilities, including tax exposure
This architecture becomes especially relevant under Nigeria’s new tax rules, where errors at the transaction stage—misclassification, missing documentation, or unauthorised spend—can cascade into compliance failures or permanent cash loss.
At the centre of Bujeti’s current strategy is tax automation embedded directly into workflows.
The platform supports automated calculation of Withholding Tax (WHT) and Value Added Tax (VAT) based on transaction type, embedding Nigeria’s tax rules into payment execution rather than post-transaction reporting. For finance teams, this reduces reliance on manual interpretation, spreadsheets, and retrospective reconciliation.
Bujeti also operates as an Access Point Provider (APP) to the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), allowing eligible businesses to remit taxes directly from the platform.
According to the company, this approach serves two core purposes: Reducing under-compliance, which exposes businesses to penalties and regulatory scrutiny. There’s also preventing overpayment, which quietly drains liquidity in a system where refunds are rare and difficult to obtain
“Once money leaves your account as tax, getting it back is almost impossible,” Arouko noted. “So the real value is stopping mistakes before payment happens.”
The platform also includes “tax vaults”, allowing businesses to ring-fence funds earmarked for tax obligations—an increasingly important cash-management discipline as enforcement tightens and filing windows shorten.
Why SMEs are most exposed
While large enterprises struggle with complexity, small and medium-sized businesses face the highest compliance risk.
Nigeria’s tax reforms introduce a paradox: companies with annual turnover below ₦50 million may qualify for zero-rate company income tax under the new Act, but they still face strict filing obligations. Failure to file can mean losing tax-exempt status altogether.
Egwu Nnanna, Senior Product Manager at Bujeti, argues that this is where automation matters most.
“Most SMEs don’t fail because they don’t want to comply,” Nnanna said. “They fail because compliance depends on memory, manual tracking, or external advisers who are expensive and inconsistent.”
SMEs often lack in-house tax expertise, rely on fragmented tools, or outsource compliance at costs disproportionate to their scale. By automating tax calculation and embedding it into everyday transactions, platforms like Bujeti aim to make compliance default, not discretionary.
This is particularly relevant under the 2024 WHT rules, where higher rates apply to vendors without Tax Identification Numbers (TINs)—effectively forcing businesses to verify counterparties before payment is made.
Edidiong Ekong, Growth and Marketing Advisor at Bujeti, shared his thinking behind the product. “We believe in the power of this launch to create a tailwind for nationwide adoption of Bujeti. The compounding effect of the new tax laws and Bujeti’s intelligent distribution could see the product become one of Nigeria’s top 3 fintechs in a year,” A sentiment echoed by Caleb Nnamani, who drives storytelling and PR for the company.
Control as governance, not micromanagement
Beyond tax, Bujeti is positioning itself as a governance tool for growing organisations.
Finance leaders can pre-set spending rules—such as “no payment without a receipt” or “no expense outside approved budgets”—and allow the system to enforce them automatically. Once policies are live, enforcement no longer depends on manual oversight or internal policing.
“You shouldn’t need to chase people or review everything after the fact,” Arouko said. “If the rule is set, the system enforces it.”
For CFOs and founders, this shifts governance from reactive to preventative:
- Fewer surprise liabilities
- Cleaner audit trails
- Stronger confidence for banks, auditors, and investors
Because transaction records cannot be altered retroactively, Bujeti also functions as a trust layer—particularly useful during audits, fundraising, or regulatory reviews.
Building for cross-border ambition
Although Nigeria is the immediate focus, Bujeti’s roadmap reflects broader African realities.
The platform already supports naira, US dollar, and Kenyan shilling transactions, with plans to expand into Ghana, francophone markets, and additional currencies, including the euro and pound sterling.
This matters because cross-border expansion introduces new tax risks—particularly around permanent establishment, VAT registration thresholds, and multi-currency reporting. A unified system that preserves transaction-level data across markets simplifies compliance and reduces blind spots that often only surface during audits.
Why this matters beyond Bujeti
Nigeria’s tax reforms are not unique. Across Africa, regulators are pushing for greater formalisation, better transaction data, and more predictable revenue collection.
What is changing is the mechanism. Compliance is moving closer to the payments layer, and software platforms are becoming intermediaries between businesses and tax authorities.
Bujeti bets that companies will increasingly prefer systems that make compliance unavoidable but painless, rather than navigating ambiguity with manual workarounds.
For founders and CFOs, the implication is clear: the cost of weak financial infrastructure is rising. In a more formalised tax environment, control is no longer a luxury—it is risk management.
