Cossi Achille Arouko and Samy Chiba co-founded Bujeti in 2022 with a single thesis: that African businesses were being underserved not at the payment layer, but at the control layer: the infrastructure that governs how money moves before and after it leaves an account. Three years and several product launches later, the Y Combinator-backed platform has added payroll to a suite that already covers corporate cards, expense management, vendor payments, tax management, and multi-currency operations.
We spoke to both founders about what payroll reveals about the problem Bujeti is actually solving, and what it takes to build a Finance Control Centre from scratch on a continent where the infrastructure is still catching up.
Payroll feels like an obvious category for a platform like Bujeti. Why did it take until now?
Arouko: Nothing about building this has been obvious from the inside. When we started, the most pressing thing was giving businesses visibility and control over spending: cards, budgets, approvals. That was the hole. We filled it.
Then it became clear that payments were broken: vendors being paid via WhatsApp instructions, no audit trail, no approval workflow. We built that. Then tax became urgent, especially with everything happening with FIRS and the 2025 Tax Act. We built the Tax Vault. Each product has come because we watched businesses hit a specific wall.
Payroll was always on the roadmap. But we were deliberate about sequencing. We did not want to bolt payroll on as a feature. We wanted it to be native to the platform, where it connects hiring decisions to budgets, payroll to reconciliation, deductions to the Tax Vault. That takes time to build properly.
Chiba: There is also the trust question. Payroll is the most sensitive financial operation a business runs. If your expense management tool has a bug, you fix it and move on. If your payroll has a bug on the last working day of the month, you have a people crisis, not just a finance problem. We had to be certain before we launched this publicly.
You use the phrase “Finance Control Centre” constantly. What does it actually mean in practice?
Arouko: Most businesses experience their finances as a collection of disconnected events. Money comes in. Money goes out. HR runs payroll. Finance reconciles it afterwards. Someone uses a card. Someone else uploads the receipt three weeks later. The result is that nobody has a real-time picture of what is happening financially, and by the time they do, it is too late to make a different decision.
A Finance Control Centre means every financial event: every card transaction, every vendor payment, salary disbursement, or tax remittance happens inside one system, under one governance structure, with one audit trail. Control is not retrospective.
It is structural. You cannot accidentally overspend a budget because the system will not let you. You cannot run payroll without an approval because the workflow requires it. You cannot forget to separate PAYE because it is ring-fenced the moment the deduction is calculated.
Chiba: The analogy we use internally is a cockpit. A pilot does not land a plane by remembering what all the instruments said two hours ago. They have a dashboard where everything is visible in real time, and the controls are right there. That is what we are building for finance teams. Not a better spreadsheet. A cockpit.
The reconciliation problem keeps coming up in how you describe payroll. Is that really the central issue?
Arouko: It is the most visible cost, but it is not the only one. The real issue is that when payroll runs across disconnected systems, an HR tool here, a bank portal there, a spreadsheet in the middle, finance loses three things simultaneously: time, visibility, and control.
The time loss is the reconciliation. Two, three days every month, just to close the books on something that should have been automatic.
The visibility loss is that finance does not see the full payroll picture before disbursement, they see a total, not the detail needed to catch an error.
The control loss is the approval chain: an email to a COO who approves without budget context, payments made before anyone in finance has confirmed the numbers are correct.
Bujeti restores all three at once. Reconciliation is automatic because payroll is already inside the platform where the budgets and financial reports live. Visibility is real-time, finance sees the full breakdown, by employee, by department, by deduction, before anything moves. And control is structural, the approval workflow is built in, with budget enforcement, so payroll cannot run without finance sign-off.
Chiba: I want to add something here, because I think it is important. We are not saying HR should not be involved in payroll. HR should absolutely manage employee data, new hires, salary changes, leave deductions, all of it. What we are saying is that the financial control layer, approvals, budget checks, disbursement, reconciliation, belongs inside the finance system. Those are different functions, and they should have different ownership. Bujeti gives finance that ownership without taking anything away from HR.
Tell me about the Hiring Planner. It feels like it starts further upstream than most payroll products.
Chiba: That is exactly the point. Most payroll tools process decisions that have already been made. You hired someone, now let’s run their salary. We think that is too late.
The financial consequence of a hiring decision, the monthly cost, the annual impact, the budget variance, should be visible before the decision is made. That is what the Hiring Planner does.
You are considering a senior engineer. You put the role into the Hiring Planner. It shows you the exact monthly payroll cost, what that does to the department budget annually, and whether you have variance to absorb it. You make the hiring decision with the financial consequence already in the room.
Arouko: This is the thing about being a Finance Control Centre that I think people underestimate. Control is not just about what happens when money moves. It is about what happens before. The Hiring Planner is control before the cost exists. That is genuinely new for most African businesses, and it matters enormously for managing cash flow in environments where runway is real and naira volatility is constant.
Nigeria’s 2025 Tax Act has been a recurring theme in Bujeti’s product launches this year. How much of payroll is a response to that specifically?
Arouko: It accelerated the urgency, but it did not create the need. Payroll tax compliance in Nigeria, PAYE, pension, NHF, has always been complex. Multi-state routing alone is a problem most finance teams have been solving manually for years. What the Tax Act did was remove the margin for error. The penalties are steeper. The audit visibility is higher. The tolerance for “we’ll fix it next month” has essentially gone.
You have been compared to Brex and Ramp in the US, and Capital One’s acquisition of Brex has come up in coverage of Bujeti. How do you think about that comparison?
Arouko: Honestly, it validates the category more than it validates us specifically. What Capital One paid for was the insight that the software governing how businesses control their finances is worth more than the banking infrastructure underneath it. We have believed that since 2022. The acquisition is proof that the market agrees.
The African context is different in important ways. The ecosystem is less mature. The regulatory landscape shifts faster. The infrastructure we build on is less reliable. We have said openly that we are building on top of an immature ecosystem.And that is not a complaint, it is a description of the work. Building for African complexity makes the product better for emerging markets everywhere.
Chiba: The businesses we serve are also different from Brex’s early customers. Brex started with Silicon Valley startups with dollar accounts and Stripe payments. We are building for companies managing naira payroll across multiple states, doing cross-border payments to Kenya while navigating FIRS and the 2025 Tax Act, and trying to get their first institutional loan with three years of structured financial records as their only collateral. The complexity is real. The opportunity is larger.
Only 15% of African enterprises currently use online accounting tools. How do you close that gap?
Chiba: Distribution is not just a sales problem. It is a trust and education problem. Most businesses are not on spreadsheets because they are resistant to software; they are on spreadsheets because nobody has shown them a system they trust to run payroll on payday without breaking. That is why we offer a test run before going live. Run your payroll through Bujeti in parallel with your current system. Compare the outputs. When you are confident—and most companies are confident within 72 hours of setup, you switch. The first two payroll cycles are free. We absorb the risk of the transition.
Arouko: The SMEDAN partnership and the PreCEFI partnership are also part of this. We are not waiting for businesses to find us. We are going to where they are: through the government relationships, through business hubs like the Premia Business Network, through the finance affiliate programme. Every accountant who brings a client onto Bujeti is a distribution partner. Every client who experiences automatic reconciliation for the first time is an advocate.
What does Bujeti look like in five years?
Arouko: I want every ambitious African business, whether it has ten employees or five hundred, to run its finances on Bujeti. Not because we have locked them in, but because the alternative is going backwards. Going back to spreadsheets and WhatsApp approvals and manual reconciliation after you have experienced a system where the books close them. Nobody does that voluntarily.
Chiba: The product will keep growing. Payroll is not the end of the platform. But the frame stays constant: a Finance Control Centre that gives African businesses the toolkit and intelligence to operate with a CFO in the room, regardless of their size or stage. That is what we are building. We are a long way from done.
Bujeti Payroll is available now. Existing users can access it from their dashboard. New businesses can sign up or book a demo at bujeti.com. First two payroll cycles are free.
