Central Bank of Lesotho replaces paper-based budget management with real-time control across over 50 cost centres.

The Central Bank of Lesotho is the country’s monetary authority, responsible for financial stability and the management of public funds across a complex internal structure of more than 50 cost centres. The finance department sits at the centre of that structure, managing the annual budget process, confirming expenditure requests, and delivering monthly and quarterly reporting to board and governor level. Before IDU, every part of that function ran on paper and spreadsheets.

Manneheng Hlomisi, Head of Budget and Procurement, has been with the Central Bank for close to 20 years and has led the budget function through the transition. She describes the pre-IDU environment in specific terms. Consolidating the annual budget across 50-plus cost centres into a single board document was a manual exercise prone to error and delay. Confirming budget utilisation when expenditure requests came in from cost centres meant physically retrieving printed Excel sheets from files and marking them off one by one. Monthly and quarterly variance reporting required paper to be sent to every cost centre, responses collected by hand, and reports compiled from the returned annotations. “The reports will always be untimely,” says Hlomisi. “You can just imagine how tedious it was.”

The gap showed most clearly when senior management needed information at short notice. A request from the Governor for the remaining balance in a travel budget meant going to the ERP system, locating the relevant account, and calculating what remained. With IDU, that answer is available immediately. For a finance function accountable at the highest level of the institution, that shift from retrospective to real-time is a material change in how the department operates.

Maletsatsi Mosito, Management Accountant, joined the Central Bank after IDU was already in place. She knows the system only from the working side, not from the paper-based world it replaced. Her perspective on what makes it effective is grounded in daily use. Within her first year, she had learned the system well enough to train other users. “By the end of year one, I was very well knowledgeable about it and was already training other users on how to access, export reports, and capture figures,” she says. That speed of adoption matters in an institution where finance staff need to be operational quickly.

Mosito also highlights the reporting capability as central to how her role functions. As management accountant, she prepares reports for different levels of management, each with different information needs. IDU accommodates that directly: summary views show budget versus actuals on a single page, while drill-down functionality lets her go to individual transactions when the detail is needed. Role-based access control means each cost centre manager sees only their own data, removing both information overload and the risk of confidential figures reaching the wrong audience. And for cases where bespoke formatting is needed, the ability to export to Excel gives the team flexibility without sacrificing the controlled environment IDU provides.

A partner in success

Mark Sayle, Account Manager at IDU, says: “The Central Bank of Lesotho has been a partner of IDU for over 14 years, and the depth of how Manneheng and Maletsatsi use the platform reflects that maturity. From real-time budget confirmation to multi-level management reporting, they are getting genuine daily value from the system. We are proud of this long-standing partnership and remain committed to supporting the team.”

Fourteen years into the relationship, the Central Bank of Lesotho runs a budget function that bears little resemblance to the one Hlomisi inherited. Consolidation that once required manual aggregation across dozens of spreadsheets is now handled within a single system. Expenditure confirmation that once meant searching through physical files is now answered in seconds. Variance reporting that once took weeks of paper-based correspondence is now a structured, timely process. And new team members like Mosito can be productive and training others within their first year. 

“With IDU, you’re able to have the summary figures with budget and actuals all in one page, and then the ability to drill down to see what actually happened, transaction by transaction. That has been helpful because now I’m able to report to different levels of management depending on their needs.”

— Maletsatsi Mosito, Management Accountant, Central Bank of Lesotho