How M-Pesa fee payments reach the ledger
When a parent pays to your school’s Paybill, Safaricom sends WIK Scholar a confirmation. The system reads the account reference the parent typed and matches it to a learner by admission number or UPI — tolerant of mixed case, spaces and missing separators, so "adm 412", "ADM-0412" and "adm0412" all resolve to the same learner.
The payment then goes through one locked posting path: it is recorded against the learner’s invoice, any overpayment becomes a credit that is applied to the next term automatically, and a sequential receipt number is issued inside the same transaction. Duplicate confirmations from Safaricom are collapsed, so a payment can never be counted twice.
STK Push: parents pay in seconds
From the parent portal a guardian taps Pay Now, confirms the amount and enters their M-Pesa PIN on their phone. The bursar can trigger the same prompt from the fees screen when a parent is standing at the office. The amount M-Pesa actually charged is treated as authoritative, and stale prompts are re-checked with Safaricom so nothing is left hanging as "pending".
The unmatched payments queue
Some payments will always arrive with a wrong or missing reference. Instead of rejecting them — which would bounce a parent’s money — WIK Scholar accepts every confirmation and places anything it cannot match in an Unmatched M-Pesa queue. The bursar assigns each one to a learner with one click, and the receipt is issued from there.
Receipts, refunds and reports the auditor will accept
- Persisted, sequential receipt numbers per school (for example RCPT-<code>-00041); reprints are clearly marked DUPLICATE.
- A daily cash-up grouped by settlement time, so the totals match what actually landed in the account that day.
- Refunds follow a lifecycle with segregation of duties — the person who requests a refund cannot confirm it — and M-Pesa refunds can be paid out by B2C.
- Collection, arrears and daily reports with CSV export, plus per-learner fee statements with carried-forward balances.
- Card and mobile-money checkout through Paystack is also supported for schools that want it.
Your Paybill, your credentials
Each school connects its own Paybill and Daraja credentials, stored encrypted at rest, with a per-school callback secret. Money goes straight from parents to the school’s own account — WIK Scholar never holds school funds. The integration is built and verified against the Safaricom sandbox; we take each school through Safaricom’s production go-live step during onboarding.