Loan management software built around mobile money, for Kenya
In a cash-heavy market the risk is a short bag. In Kenya it is a paybill payment with a mistyped reference, posted to the wrong loan — or posted twice. Vasool treats reconciliation as the main job: every payment carries its channel and transaction reference, member and borrower records stay distinct, and group lending is a first-class structure. Amounts run in KES on Africa/Nairobi business dates.
Reconciliation first, collection second
When most repayments arrive over M-Pesa, the operational failure modes change: reference matching, duplicate posting, wrong-account transfers and delayed reconciliation. This is what the book has to defend against.
Speak the routine, approve the consequential
Officers dictate collections in Swahili and English and Vasool writes a structured record — borrower, amount, channel — not an audio clip. The records that carry real consequence go the other way: gate them per role and they wait in the approvals inbox until an owner or manager decides, with both outcomes on the audit trail.
Money out, spoken the same way
Expenses are dictated like collections — "Fuel 500" — and land in the income and expense ledger with a receipt photo attached. Both sides of the round are captured where they happen, so the day book closes against real cash rather than a number reconstructed from memory.
Channel and transaction reference on every payment
Each repayment records how it arrived — M-Pesa paybill, till, bank transfer or cash — and carries its transaction reference, so a payment can always be traced back to the evidence.
Post against the right loan, once
Payments are posted to a specific loan with a correction trail, so a duplicate or a wrongly applied payment is visible and reversible rather than silently absorbed into a balance.
Members, groups and chamas
Run group-based lending with member-level principal, interest and history preserved underneath — a SACCO member is a saver and a borrower at once, and the records should reflect that.
Account-level cash-flow reporting
Register your paybill, till and bank accounts, tag every collection, disbursement and expense to one, and pull date-ranged cash flow by account so book entries reconcile against statements.
Borrower documents and consent on file
Store identification and address evidence against each borrower, alongside the terms they were given — the paper trail behind a fair-lending story.
Audit trail and need-to-know data scoping
Every edit and closure is logged with who did it and when, and roles default to seeing only their own customers — no field phone holds the whole member register unless you allow it.
The route is the unit of the day
Plan daily and weekly routes, assign them to officers, and track completion as it happens with live GPS and a location history behind it. Every collection and expense is tagged to the route it came from, which is what makes end-of-day cash settlement a reconciliation rather than an argument.
Reports that close the day and the month
A day book per route, officer performance with collection efficiency and expense breakdown, collection summaries, overdue and DPD ageing, cash flow by account and profit and loss — each exportable as PDF or CSV, and answerable by voice when you would rather ask than navigate.
From payment notification to reconciled book
Set up your company in KES
Pick Kenya at setup: shilling amounts, Africa/Nairobi business dates and local phone formats, on your own isolated database.
Register accounts and groups
Add your paybill, till and bank accounts, then set up members, borrowers and any groups or chamas that lend together.
Record the payment with its reference
Whether the money came by M-Pesa, transfer or cash, the payment is posted to a loan with its channel and reference attached.
Reconcile by account, not by hope
Pull cash flow by account for the period and match it against your statements. Expected collection is never treated as received.
Who this is for in Kenya
Kenya combines banks, microfinance banks, SACCOs, group-based finance and licensed digital credit providers. They are not interchangeable, and the difference runs deeper than product design: SACCO members are owners, savers and borrowers at once, so the governance and the member relationship are fundamentally unlike a private route-lending business.
SASRA regulates relevant deposit-taking and specified non-deposit-taking SACCOs. The Central Bank of Kenya's Digital Credit Providers Regulations introduced licensing and oversight covering governance, lending practices, consumer protection, credit information, personal data and unethical collection. Which of these you sit under decides your obligations — Vasool runs the operation underneath whichever one it is.
Vasool is collections and portfolio software. It is not a licence, a registration, or regulatory approval, and no feature in it makes an unlawful loan lawful. Confirm your legal entity, lending permission and permitted product scope with a qualified local lawyer before your first disbursement.
Why mobile money changes the software, not just the workflow
A daily route in South India and a SACCO loan in Nairobi can share a repayment rhythm and share almost nothing else. When payments arrive as mobile-money notifications rather than notes in a bag, the thing most likely to go wrong stops being theft and starts being attribution: the right amount, from the right person, applied to the wrong loan.
That is why the system of record has to capture the actual payment channel and the transaction evidence rather than just a figure and a date. It is also why corrections need a trail — a reversal that leaves no history is indistinguishable from a cover-up when someone asks six months later.
Consumer-protection and data expectations under the digital credit rules point the same way. Borrower data should be held on a need-to-know basis, contact lists are not a collection tool, and recovery conduct has to be documented and respectful. Vasool is built for lenders who want that on the record, not lenders looking to avoid it.
Voice entry and approvals in Kenya
A collector standing in front of a borrower is holding a cash bag and a phone, and the queue behind is not waiting. That is where entries get skipped and written up from memory at night — and a book reconstructed at night is a book nobody can defend. In Kenya the officer speaks the entry instead — Swahili and English — and Vasool matches the borrower, parses the amount and the channel, and shows the match for confirmation before anything is saved.
Speed is right for a repayment and wrong for a decision. A collection is high-volume and low-consequence, so it posts as soon as the officer confirms it — the confirmation screen is the control. The records that change what a borrower owes are low-volume and high-consequence, so they can be gated instead: switch maker-checker on for the ones that matter here — a loan's terms rewritten, a member added to a group or chama, and a route reassigned — the changes that decide what lands in the paybill later — and the change is held as a request rather than applied, routed to an owner or an assigned approver, and written to the audit trail whether it is approved or rejected.
The gate is set per role and per resource, so you are not choosing between slowing every officer down and controlling nothing. It covers customers, loans, chit and savings schemes, gold sales, expenses, staff, roles and routes today; holding an individual collection entry for approval is on the roadmap, not shipping. The voice approval workflow page walks through what is held, who it routes to, and what the trail records for each outcome.
A full day on the route, not just the collections
Software that records only repayments measures half a round. An officer working a route in Kenya collects money and also spends it, and "Fuel 500" is exactly the kind of entry that never reaches the book when it is scribbled on a slip and typed up that evening — which is when the cash bag stops matching. Vasool takes both by voice: the collection at the doorstep, the expense at the moment it is incurred, each with a photo where the evidence matters.
Everything attaches to the route. Routes are planned and assigned ahead of the day, officers navigate them with GPS, completion is tracked as it happens, and a location history shows where staff actually went. Because each collection and expense carries its route, the day book is per route and end-of-day settlement compares one officer's cash against one officer's recorded movements — not against a pooled total nobody can decompose.
What comes out of that is reporting you can act on: officer performance with collection efficiency, attendance and expense breakdown; overdue and DPD ageing; cash flow by account; and profit and loss for the period, exportable as PDF or CSV. The voice approval workflow page shows how capture, control and reporting fit together across every market.
Before your first disbursement in Kenya
Work through this with your own counsel. Vasool holds the records; it cannot answer any of these for you.
- Confirm your legal form and permission — SACCO under SASRA, licensed digital credit provider, microfinance institution or bank.
- Confirm your pricing and how total cost of credit must be disclosed to the borrower.
- Register the paybill, till and bank accounts your repayments actually land in, before you start posting.
- Record the original principal separately from interest, fees and penalties.
- Define how a payment with a wrong or missing reference is investigated and corrected.
- Confirm your personal-data obligations for borrower information, and restrict staff access accordingly.
- Document your collection conduct rules — no harassment, contact-list abuse, public shaming or threats.