Know exactly who owes what, this morning, without opening a ledger.
Balances are recomputed from the bills and receipts underneath them rather than maintained by hand, so the arrears list the bursar prints on Monday is the same one the principal sees and the same one behind the reminder a guardian receives.
Payments are append-only. A receipt entered in error is corrected by a reversal carrying a reason, never by an edit, and every action that touches money is written to an audit log with the person and role who performed it. A year later, the books still show what actually happened.
Tuition, boarding, transport, lunch, activity and one-off charges are separate items, priced per class and term, with scholarships, bursaries and sibling discounts handled as approved awards rather than as edited totals.
Fee collection is the process on which every other part of a school depends, and it is almost always the process running furthest from the rest of the school’s information. Fees live in a separate ledger, or a separate spreadsheet, or a separate package that does not know what a stream is.
Msomi puts the fee book on the same learner record as everything else.
A fee item is a name — tuition, boarding, transport, lunch, an activity levy — and nothing more. It carries no price, because the same item costs differently in Grade 4 and in Form 3. Price belongs to the structure: a set of items with amounts and due dates, attached to one class for one term of one academic year.
Structures are drafted, then published. Publishing is deliberately one-way. Correcting a structure that has already been published creates a new version and archives the old one, which means the school can always answer what it was charging in a given term without having to reconstruct it.
Items marked optional — the bus, lunch, a trip — are billed only to families who have opted in. Silence is not consent: a family that has said nothing is not charged.
Bills are raised per class, per term, in the cycle Kenyan schools actually budget in. Each line carries a snapshot of what it was for and what it cost at the moment it was written, so revising next term’s structure does not silently rewrite last term’s bill.
Generation is safe to re-run. A bill that already carries a line for a given charge will not receive it twice, so a bursar who is unsure whether Friday’s run finished can simply run it again.
Once issued, a bill is not editable. A charge added late, a fee waived, a credit granted — each is a separate adjustment against the bill with a reason attached, and each can be reversed but not erased. A bill raised in error is voided, with the reason recorded.
Money is receipted against the learner, not against a particular bill. A parent hands over twenty thousand shillings and does not say which term it settles; the office should not have to invent an answer. Msomi allocates it to the oldest debt first and holds anything left over as credit rather than refusing it — prepaying a term and settling two siblings at once are the normal case, not the exception.
Every receipt records how the money arrived: an M-Pesa code, a bank slip, a cheque number. Posting the same M-Pesa code twice is the commonest error at the counter and the only one that inflates collections, so references are checked for duplicates before anything is written.
For the monthly reconciliation, a bank or M-Pesa statement export is uploaded as a spreadsheet and matched to learners on their admission numbers. Rows that do not match, or that carry a reference already receipted, are reported back rather than guessed at.
Nothing here is ever edited. A payment entered wrongly is reversed by a counter-entry with a stated reason, exactly as a paper ledger would do it, because silently editing a receipt is how a ledger stops being evidence.
Scholarships, bursaries and discounts are recorded as awards against a learner — a fixed amount or a percentage, for a term or a whole year, against the whole bill or a single item, with the sponsor named where the money comes from a CDF, a county or a church.
An award does not reduce a bill until it has been approved. That separation matters: the person who proposes relief and the person who authorises it are rarely the same, and a school needs to be able to show which was which.
Each school sets its own schedule — how many days before a due date the first reminder goes out, how often an overdue balance is chased after that, and what time of day messages should arrive. Reminders are sent on the school’s own clock, so a guardian is reached at breakfast rather than at three in the morning. A minimum balance can be set below which nobody is chased, because no school should send a weekly reminder over forty shillings left on a rounded-down bursary.
Notifications reach confirmed guardians only, and they are deliberately thin — a receipt number, not an amount. What a family owes their child’s school is nobody else’s business, least of all anyone standing near their lock screen. The figures live behind the statement, which checks who is asking first.
Collection rate against what was billed, today’s takings for the bursar’s till check, outstanding balances broken down by class, the number of learners fully paid and the number overdue. Arrears are listed with the age of the oldest unpaid item, so follow-up can start with the families who have been waiting longest for a conversation.
Behind all of it sits an audit trail covering every action that touches money — who published a structure, who issued the bills, who took the payment, who approved the bursary — recorded with the person’s role as it was at the time. What the board asks for at the end of term is a page rather than a project.
A demo runs about forty minutes and uses your own class lists, frameworks and grading — so you are looking at your school rather than a sample database.
Or try it first — the Trial tier gives you a full term, free, with every module unlocked. See plans.
Either way we confirm your school by phone before activating it, so you are live usually within one working day.
