Till and Paybill messages arrive by the dozen while you're mid-meeting. Here's how to turn that message stream into a reconciled ledger that ties out at month-end — without turning into a full-time data entry job.
Here's the routine most Kenyan SMEs run: the phone buzzes all day with "K Sh 4,500 received from ...", you glance at it, maybe you scribble a note, and at month-end you sit down with a spreadsheet and try to remember which payment belonged to which invoice. Somewhere around the fortieth row you give up and "adjust" the difference.
The problem isn't discipline — it's that a raw M-Pesa message doesn't name the invoice it's paying. It has an amount, a sender, a Till or Paybill number, and a time. None of those tell you it settled INV-2026-0148. So every payment needs to be matched by guesswork, and guesswork doesn't survive an audit.
| Detail | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Amount | The first thing that should match your invoice total. |
| Sender | Tells you who paid — but not what. |
| Till / Paybill | Which channel the money came through — your data vs. personal. |
| Reference | The missing piece: what the payment was for. |
Get the reference right and reconciliation stops being detective work.
The loop that works is boring and it works every month:
When it's working, your month-end looks like this — every payment reconciled to an invoice before you've finished your tea:
Both are valid business channels; they just suit different jobs. A Till is what retail customers expect — quick, no account number to remember. A Paybill with an account number is the better fit for invoiced sales, because the account number is the reference. If a customer pays an invoice through the wrong channel, that's fine — the reference in the message still tells you what they paid for.
Tieghtsuite does the matching for you — payments land against the right client and invoice the moment they arrive, whether they come through a Till, a Paybill, or card via Pesapal. The loop above is what your accountant wishes every client ran. Try it free.
Every M-Pesa payment reconciled to its invoice automatically — Till, Paybill, or Pesapal card. Set up in about five minutes.
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