Kenya
Zetu is a Kiswahili word. It means ours.
- ExpectedKSh 2,880,000100%
240 units × KSh 12,000
- ReceivedKSh 2,610,00090.6%
Across four payment rails
- ReconciledKSh 2,472,00085.8%
Matched to a specific unit and month
- Needs reviewKSh 138,0004.8%
11 payments a person must look at
- OutstandingKSh 270,0009.4%
23 units still owing
The rest of this site is written for a reader who could be anywhere. This page is written for one who knows what a chama is, and why the account field is usually empty.
Zetu is an international platform. The obligation model does not know which country it is in: currency, payment rails, the tax vocabulary and the calendar a charge runs on are configuration rather than assumptions welded into the data model. A service charge in Nairobi, a strata levy in Sydney and a condominium fee in Toronto are the same object with different words around it.
But it was not designed in the abstract. It was built against Kenyan receivables, which are unusually demanding: most of the money arrives on a rail that carries a phone number and an amount and very little else, one member routinely pays for another, and the person holding the record is a volunteer treasurer whose evidence is a phone. A system built for that handles stored-card subscriptions comfortably. The reverse is not true — which is why the tidy-market products struggle here, and this one does not.
The rails
Paybill, till, PesaLink, standing order, cash.
A paybill asks the payer to type an account number on a phone keypad, which is exactly as reliable as that sounds. A till does not ask at all. A bank transfer carries whatever the payer put in the narration, and a standing order carries the same string every month whether or not it is still correct.
So Zetu treats the reference as evidence rather than as truth. Registered paying numbers are learned from history — including the spouse's, the househelp's and the employer's — and every proposed match shows the reasons behind it before anyone approves it. How the matching works.
- M-PESA paybill, with or without an account reference
- Till and merchant collections, which carry no reference at all
- Bank transfer, EFT, RTGS and PesaLink credits
- Standing orders allocated across several obligations
- Cash and check recorded with an entering user
- Statements reconciled independently against collection records
- Payments from unregistered numbers matched on history
- Suspense for money that genuinely cannot be attributed
- M-PESA paybill61%KSh 1,592,100
- Bank transfer & PesaLink28%KSh 731,000
- Standing order8%KSh 208,800
- Cash & check3%KSh 78,100
What goes wrong
Six failure modes any Kenyan treasurer can recite from memory.
Paybill account field left blank
The payer skipped it, or typed their own name into it. Nothing identifies the unit or the member.
Payment from a relative's line
A spouse, a househelp or a son pays. The registered name on the line is not the member.
A till instead of a paybill
No account field exists at all, so every payment arrives with an amount and a number and nothing else.
One payment, several months
A resident clearing three months of arrears in one transfer that has to settle three obligations.
Round amounts, identical members
Everyone owes the same service charge, so the amount identifies nobody.
Landlord paying for a tenant
Money for a unit arriving from somebody who is not the occupier, and must not overwrite who lives there.
M-PESA paybill254 7•• ••4 118
Account field left blank. The number is registered to the tenant of House 14B, and the amount is exactly one month's service charge.
Bank transferW. Kiprono
An owner settling three months for a unit that is let. Allocated to the unit's obligations, with the owner recorded as the payer.
M-PESA paybill254 7•• ••9 032
Reference reads MAMA WATOTO. No unit, no registered number, and the amount matches no outstanding obligation.
The vocabulary
A mchango is not a subscription invoice.
| Term | What it means | What it is in Zetu |
|---|---|---|
| Chama | An investment, savings or welfare group — friends, family or colleagues contributing to a common pot. | A group of members, each carrying a recurring contribution obligation with its own fund. |
| Mchango · michango | A contribution, and contributions. What a member owes the group this month. | A recurring obligation, distinct from a payment against it. |
| Harambee | A pull-together: a one-off drive to raise money for a purpose, often with pledges made in public. | A one-off appeal with pledges tracked separately from enforceable dues, and never chased like a debt. |
| SACCO | A savings and credit cooperative, with members, shares, deposits and monthly contributions. | Member contributions and standing. Zetu records them; it does not take deposits or lend. |
| Karo · ada | School fees, usually charged per term and frequently paid in installments by more than one parent. | A termly obligation with an installment plan, and two payers against one student's account. |
| Service charge | The monthly levy a resident or owner pays an estate or apartment block for shared services. | An obligation owed because the unit is occupied, not because anyone signed for it this month. |
| Paybill · till | The M-PESA short codes a business collects on. A paybill asks the payer for an account number; a till does not. | A collection rail with an optional, human-typed reference — treated as evidence, never as truth. |
| Salio · deni | Balance, and debt. What a member will ask the treasurer for, usually on WhatsApp, usually at night. | A standing, which is a balance plus the reason for it and what should happen next. |
| Faini | A fine or penalty, provided for in the constitution and waived more often than it is applied. | An obligation created by the breach of another obligation — with the waiver recorded too. |
| Mweka hazina | The treasurer. In most Kenyan groups, also the system of record, the audit trail and the help desk. | A role with permissions, and a handover that does not lose eleven years of history. |
The product interface is in English. The vocabulary is not decoration — modelling a harambee pledge as a different object from a service charge is what stops a member being chased for money they only ever promised.
Who this is for in Kenya
Same platform, six familiar shapes.
Residents' & homeowner associations
Service charge, water, sinking funds and special levies — with an arrears schedule that survives the AGM.
Learn moreSchools & education
Termly karo, transport and meals, split across installment plans and two parents.
Learn moreChamas, welfare groups & SACCOs
Michango, welfare funds, levies and faini — with a record every member can check.
Learn moreChurches & faith communities
Pledges, harambee drives and building funds — tracked with care, never collected like debt.
Learn moreAssociations & professional bodies
Annual dues, chapter fees, certification and firms paying for their staff.
Learn moreInternet & subscription services
Monthly plans, suspension on non-payment, and reconnection the moment money is matched.
Learn moreWhat we are not
Zetu holds no money, and no license to hold it.
Funds stay in your own bank, paybill and mobile money accounts from beginning to end. Zetu records what is owed, reconciles what arrived, and shows what remains. It takes no deposits, holds no float, lends nothing, pays no interest and moves no money — so it is not a payment service provider and holds no license from the Central Bank of Kenya, because none is required for what it does.
Where your organization lends to members or takes deposits — a SACCO, a lending chama — the licensing that applies to that activity applies to you, not to your record-keeping software, and you should take your own advice on it.
On personal data: your members' records are yours. Zetu processes them to run your receivables and for no other purpose, and the site itself sets no cookies and loads no third-party scripts. Where the Data Protection Act, 2019 applies to your organization you remain the data controller, and the contractual terms that go with that are settled in writing rather than asserted on a marketing page. How the architecture handles that.
Working in shillings
Your currency, end to end.
Billed in shillings
A KSh 12,000 monthly service charge is exactly that on the obligation, on the member's statement, and in the board report.
Reported in shillings
Expected, received, reconciled and outstanding are the same four figures the rest of this site describes — in your unit, to the shilling.
No conversion in the middle
Zetu does not move money, so nothing is converted on the way through. What your provider settled into your account is what reconciles against the obligation.
Figures elsewhere on this site are shown in US dollars because the reader could be anywhere. That is a choice about the website, not about the product.
Pricing in Kenya
A Kenyan list, not a converted one.
Annual is 2 months free — 10 months' money for a year of service.
Starter
A single book of accounts, one team, one set of rails.
KSh 2,900per month
Or KSh 29,000 a year, billed annually.
500 active financial accounts included, then KSh 10 each.
Growth takes over at 1,200 accounts, automatically.
For organizations moving off a spreadsheet: one association, one school, one estate, one service business. Billing, payments, reconciliation and collections on a single book — not a trial of them.
- Obligations, billing and invoicing
- Payment capture across your connected rails
- Automated matching with an exception queue
- Suspense and unallocated-money reporting
- Aging, worklists and promises to pay
- Standing with a configurable policy
- Statements, receipts and reminders
- Core reporting and exports
- Unlimited internal users
Growth
Most organizationsSeveral business units, more rails, a collections function with people in it.
KSh 9,900per month
Or KSh 99,000 a year, billed annually.
5,000 active financial accounts included, then KSh 3 each.
Scale takes over at 10,000 accounts, automatically.
For organizations running more than one book — chapters, branches, sites, territories — where reconciliation is somebody's job and policy needs to differ between units.
- Everything in Starter
- Multiple business units with their own policies
- Per-unit standing and entitlement rules
- Collection cases, assignment and escalation paths
- Payment arrangements and dispute handling
- Entitlements resolved from standing
- Bank statement comparison and mismatch findings
- Scheduled reporting to named recipients
- API access and webhooks
Scale
Large books, complex payer structures, integration into an existing finance stack.
KSh 24,900per month
Or KSh 249,000 a year, billed annually.
20,000 active financial accounts included, then KSh 1.50 each.
Above 50,000 active accounts we quote instead of listing.
For organizations where receivables is a function rather than a task: large account volumes, corporate payers with many beneficiaries, and a ledger that Zetu needs to post into.
- Everything in Growth
- Corporate payers with named beneficiaries at scale
- Accounting posting and reconciliation back to the ledger
- Advanced matching rules and confidence thresholds
- Role-based access across large teams
- Extended audit and change history retention
- Implementation and data migration support
- A named point of contact
KSh 2,900 is not $29 at today's rate, and it is not meant to be. This is a list priced for what the work is worth to a Kenyan association, estate or school, which is why it does not move when the shilling does. The international list is here.
There is no cliff between the plans. Past 500 active accounts, Starter adds KSh 10 each until Growth is simply the cheaper calculation at 1,200 accounts — at which point you are moved onto it. An estate that grows by one unit pays for one unit.
Your M-PESA, bank and gateway charges are unchanged and unshared: Zetu does not sit in the payment path and takes no margin on money that moves. SMS and WhatsApp are passed through at your provider's rate.
Questions
Asked from Kenya, mostly.
Is Zetu a Kenyan product or an international one?
International, designed in Kenya. The name is Kiswahili and the product was built against Kenyan receivables — service charge, school fees, chama contributions and money arriving on paybills without a reference. That is the hard case, and a system built for it handles the tidy card-based case comfortably. The model itself carries no country: currency, rails and vocabulary are configuration, so the same platform runs an association in Nairobi and one in Lisbon.
Does Zetu work with M-PESA?
Zetu reads what your collection rails report and turns it into settled obligations — it does not move money and does not sit between you and Safaricom. Bring the paybill, till or merchant relationship you already have. Which specific connections are live is a conversation rather than a badge on a page; see the integrations page, which states availability honestly rather than assuming it.
Can it handle payments with no account number on the paybill?
That is the case it was built for. A payment with a blank account field is matched on the registered paying number, on the amount against a single outstanding obligation, and on who has paid from that number before — and where none of those is decisive it becomes a review item with the evidence attached, not a guess. The account it plausibly belongs to is also held out of the collections queue while the review is open.
Do you hold our money, or need a CBK license?
No, and no. Your funds stay in your own bank, paybill and mobile money accounts throughout. Zetu is a ledger and a workflow: it records what is owed, reconciles what arrived, and shows what remains. It takes no deposits, holds no float, moves no money and performs no regulated financial activity, so it is not a payment service provider and holds no license from the Central Bank of Kenya.
Is the interface in Kiswahili?
Not today — the product is in English, which is the working language of most Kenyan finance and committee work. What it does speak is the vocabulary: chama, mchango, harambee, karo, service charge and faini are modeled as the distinct things they are, rather than flattened into 'invoice'. Member-facing messages are templates you write, so a reminder can go out in whatever language and register your members actually use.
Which currency does Zetu bill and report in?
Yours. Obligations, payments and reports are held in your own currency, so a Kenyan organization works in shillings from end to end. Figures elsewhere on this site are shown in US dollars only because the reader could be anywhere; nothing about the product prefers one currency to another.
What does Zetu cost in Kenya?
Starter is KSh 2,900 a month for up to 500 active financial accounts, Growth KSh 9,900 for up to 5,000, and Scale KSh 24,900 for up to 20,000. Annual billing is ten months' money for the year. That is a Kenyan list rather than the dollar list converted, so it does not move with the exchange rate, and it is priced on the accounts Zetu manages rather than on what your members pay you.
Keep reading
- ReconciliationHow a payment with no reference finds its obligation.
- How to reconcile mobile money paymentsThe hardest rail, in practice.
- Chamas, welfare groups & cooperativesMichango, funds and member standing.
- IntegrationsWhat connects, stated honestly.
- Why ZetuThe argument, without the local framing.
- AboutWho is building this, and what it refuses to do.
Bring us one month of a Kenyan paybill.
A month of service charge, fees or contributions, and the payments that were meant to settle them. We will show you what matched, what did not, and who is on your arrears list wrongly.