Payments
M-PESA reconciliation: a practical playbook for finance teams
STK, C2B, and B2C are only half the job — matching references to invoices is where projects win or stall.
Jutech Team
6 min read
Mobile money is instant — accounting is not. The gap is reconciliation, and it is where most payment projects quietly win or lose.
Design references humans and machines can match
Use invoice numbers, student or tenant IDs, and predictable prefixes. Avoid “random” references that force staff to open Excel and guess.
- One source of truth for expected vs received amounts
- Daily exception queues for unmatched items — not month-end surprises
- Clear ownership: who clears exceptions, and by when
Automate Safaricom reports where you can
Automate the download of statements and ingestion into your ledger where possible. Manual Excel can be a transition bridge — it should never be the permanent system of record.
Dashboards that protect the CFO
We recommend dashboards that show collected vs recognised per day, with exception queues for support staff. If your CFO only discovers gaps at month-end, the process is backwards.