Siigo

Private

Colombia's dominant cloud accounting and ERP platform for SMEs, processing over 50% of the country's electronic invoices and serving more than 300,000 businesses.

Bogotá, Colombia | Accounting SaaS | Est. 1988 | Website

At a Glance

Strength

Processing the majority of Colombia's electronic invoices is not a market position — it is infrastructure status; switching away from Siigo for a Colombian SME involves regulatory compliance risk, not just operational inconvenience.

Challenge

Siigo's heritage as an on-premise accounting system created legacy architecture that made the cloud migration more complex and more expensive than a cloud-native competitor starting from scratch.

Opportunity

Embedded lending for SME clients is a high-value adjacent opportunity — Siigo's access to real-time invoice, cash flow, and tax data makes it one of the best-positioned underwriters of SME working capital in Colombia, without needing to build a lending origination business from scratch.

Thirty Years Before the Cloud

Siigo's story is unusual in Colombian tech: a software company founded in 1988 that survived, adapted, and ultimately thrived through every technology transition of the past three decades. What began as a DOS-based accounting system for Colombian SMEs grew into the de facto standard for small business accounting in the country — a position earned through reliability, compliance with DIAN (Colombia's tax authority) requirements, and a distribution network built around the country's accounting profession. By the time cloud computing became viable, Siigo had relationships with hundreds of thousands of businesses that it had earned over years.

The Electronic Invoicing Catalyst

Colombia's regulatory mandate for electronic invoicing — a DIAN initiative requiring all businesses above certain size thresholds to issue and receive invoices electronically — was transformative for Siigo. As the dominant accounting platform for Colombian SMEs, Siigo was positioned to be the natural home for electronic invoice processing. The mandate drove a wave of new registrations and deepened the dependency of existing customers, since a business's invoicing history, tax records, and compliance data were all embedded in Siigo's systems. Today Siigo processes over half of Colombia's electronic invoices — a statistic that speaks to both market dominance and critical infrastructure status.

The Visma Acquisition

Norwegian software group Visma acquired Siigo in 2019 as part of its strategy of acquiring dominant SME accounting platforms in emerging markets. The transaction brought capital, operational expertise, and the pressure to accelerate cloud migration and product development. Under Visma's ownership, Siigo has invested significantly in its cloud platform (Siigo Nube), expanded into payroll and HR modules, and applied European SaaS growth metrics to a business that had previously been managed as a traditional software company. The results have been meaningful: subscription revenue has grown, cloud adoption among the customer base has accelerated, and product quality has improved.

The Accountant Network

Siigo's most durable competitive advantage is not its technology — it is the Colombian accounting profession. The country's contadores are trained on Siigo in universities, certified on Siigo by Siigo's own training programs, and recommend Siigo to their SME clients as a matter of professional habit. This creates an organic referral and retention network that no marketing budget can replicate. A new entrant must not just build a better product — it must change the behavior of an entire professional community that has decades of muscle memory built around a competing system.

Product Expansion and the Path Forward

Siigo's medium-term strategy is to expand from accounting into adjacent SME software categories: payroll processing, HR management, inventory, and financial analytics. Each of these represents an opportunity to increase average revenue per customer and deepen the platform's role in daily business operations. The challenge is execution — building or acquiring products that are good enough to displace existing solutions in each category, at a pace fast enough to stay ahead of cloud-native competitors entering from the bottom of the market.

Editorial Assessment

The Good, The Bad & Opportunities

The Good

Processing the majority of Colombia's electronic invoices is not a market position — it is infrastructure status; switching away from Siigo for a Colombian SME involves regulatory compliance risk, not just operational inconvenience.
The accountant ecosystem is Siigo's most powerful distribution channel: Colombian contadores are trained on Siigo, recommend Siigo to clients, and their endorsement functions as near-permanent organic sales with no customer acquisition cost.
Visma's acquisition brought European SaaS operational discipline — product management, engineering investment, and go-to-market structure — to a company that had grown organically for 30 years without those capabilities.

The Challenge

Siigo's heritage as an on-premise accounting system created legacy architecture that made the cloud migration more complex and more expensive than a cloud-native competitor starting from scratch.
Visma's ownership means strategic and capital allocation decisions are made in Oslo — a parent whose primary market is Northern Europe and whose understanding of Colombian SME needs may diverge from local realities over time.
The SME market is chronically price-sensitive and slow to upgrade; monetizing Siigo's installed base with higher-value HR, payroll, and analytics modules has been slower than the growth trajectory would suggest.
DIAN's electronic invoicing mandate — which drove a wave of Siigo adoption — was a one-time regulatory tailwind; future growth requires genuine product expansion, not compliance-driven captive demand.
A well-funded, cloud-native competitor targeting Siigo's market with better UX and aggressive pricing could erode its SME base faster than Siigo's embedded accountant relationships can defend — the moat is real but not absolute.

Opportunities

Embedded lending for SME clients is a high-value adjacent opportunity — Siigo's access to real-time invoice, cash flow, and tax data makes it one of the best-positioned underwriters of SME working capital in Colombia, without needing to build a lending origination business from scratch.
An accountant marketplace — connecting the 300,000+ businesses on Siigo with certified contadores for bookkeeping, tax preparation, and advisory services — would monetize the professional network Siigo has built and create a recurring services revenue stream.
Regional LATAM expansion into Peru and Bolivia, both markets with similar regulatory environments and comparable SME accounting software gaps, represents a replicable playbook following the Ecuador entry.
Opening Siigo's accounting data via APIs to third-party fintechs — lending platforms, cash flow forecasting tools, insurance providers — would generate API revenue and reinforce the platform's centrality in the Colombian SME financial stack.

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