In Brazil the invoice goes to the tax authority before it goes to the customer. Software has to be built around that.
On 9 November 2026 Conta Azul, a Brazilian company that makes management software for small businesses, announced that it had bought PlayBPO, a start-up from Florianópolis whose platform is used by more than 1,200 firms that run the finances of over 15,000 small businesses. It was Conta Azul's second acquisition in four months. Read in the local news, it is a deal between two companies from Santa Catarina.
It is not quite that. Since August 2025 Conta Azul has belonged to Visma, a Norwegian group that sells business software across Europe and Latin America. Visma did not enter Brazil by translating its European products. It bought a Brazilian one, for around R$ 1.8 billion, and has kept buying around it. A few years earlier, one of the largest American software companies had tried the opposite route, and left.
The full article explains why software built for Brazil looks so different from what most European small businesses use, what that says about the way the Brazilian state collects taxes, where even a good general-purpose system stops, and what a European company should ask before deciding how it will invoice in Brazil.