Built by a company that runs on it
Backbone came out of StarTech Multimedia and Supplies, an Accra firm doing supply, ICT, electrical, renewable energy, multimedia and software since 2013. We built it because nothing we could buy fitted, and we sell it because other firms here have the same problem.
A business system, from the quotation to the ledger
Every tenant holds its own accounts, its own people and its own documents. Nothing is shared between organisations except the software itself.
Branches, roles, approval limits, tax rates, document templates and the public website are rows an administrator edits. A change does not wait for a release.
The firm that wrote it runs its supplies, engineering and multimedia business on it, as one tenant among the others, with no more access than any of them.
VAT, NHIL, GETFund, SSNIT and PAYE are rates and bands in the database, dated, with the arithmetic in one place.
We run our own business on it
Every module runs our own business before it is sold, which is a slower way to build and a harder one to fake.
- The spoilage rules came from arguments on our own floor.
- The VAT calculation was rewritten when the Act changed, not when a customer complained.
- The offline design exists because our own site in Kwabenya loses the network most afternoons.
- The school module was built alongside IT for Youth Ghana, who run real cohorts.
How Backbone is built and run
- An organisation is founded
It arrives with its own administrators, its own chart of accounts, its own roles and a public website it can edit on the first day.
- The platform stays above it
The console that administers tenants is not inside any tenant. No organisation administrator can reach another organisation from it.
- Records move with the organisation
Four hundred and eight relations carry an organisation key. What a move would have to carry is written down, per relation and per reference, before anything moves.
A young product, shipping every week
Some of it is in use, some of it is being finished, and the pages on this site say which is which. If a module is not ready for your industry we will tell you before you pay rather than after.
Sales, stores, accounts, the website and the school module run a real business and a real school every day.
Production yield for machine shops, and formulation for food and beverage. Both are named rather than implied by silence.
Talk to the people who built it
A demonstration is forty minutes and uses your own figures.