Why manual matching breaks
A bursar with a statement and a ledger has to read each line, work out which learner it belongs to and enter it. It takes days at the start of term, when payments are heaviest, and parents who paid yesterday still see an old balance. Errors surface months later as disputes.
How automatic matching works
- The parent pays to the school's paybill with the learner's admission number as the account number.
- Safaricom sends the payment to the school's system straight away.
- The system finds the learner by admission number and records the payment.
- A receipt is issued, the balance updates and the parent can receive an SMS.
The awkward cases
- Wrong or missing admission number: the payment should wait in a list for the bursar to assign, never disappear.
- One payment for several children: the amount needs splitting across siblings.
- Overpayment: the extra can be held as credit, moved to a sibling or carried forward.
- Payments that aren't fees: these can be set aside so that they do not distort the fee totals.
In Shulepoa
Shulepoa connects to your paybill, matches payments to learners and lists anything it can't match for the bursar to assign or set aside. Fee ageing reports then show who to follow up.