Reconciling mobile money with your sales at month end

Mobile money is easy to take and hard to account for. Payments land on a phone, fees come off silently, a reversal or two happens during the month, and by the 30th the wallet balance and the sales book disagree by an amount nobody can explain. A short monthly routine fixes this, and it is the same whether you are on MTN, Airtel or both.

Start with three numbers from the till

Before you open an operator statement, pull three figures from your sales records for the month:

• Total sales tendered as mobile money.
• Total mobile money refunds or reversals you authorised.
• The number of mobile money transactions.

If your system cannot give you these by payment method, that is the first thing to fix. A till that lumps every payment into "sales" cannot be reconciled against anything.

Then get the statements

Both operators give merchants a record of payments. MTN's MoMoPay page notes that both the customer and the merchant are notified by SMS for each payment and that payments are received immediately, while Airtel lists timely statements among the reasons to register as a merchant and confirms both parties receive an SMS confirmation. Download or request the full month, not the last 30 days, so the period matches your sales report exactly.

Match in this order

1. Count first. Compare the number of credits on the statement with the number of mobile money sales. A difference of two or three is usually a payment sent to a personal number, or a sale keyed as cash that was actually paid by phone.
2. Totals second. Statement credits should equal mobile money sales minus the reversals you authorised. If the statement is lower, look for payments that never arrived (the customer showed a screen, the cashier did not wait for the merchant SMS). If it is higher, look for payments nobody recorded.
3. Fees third. Fees are a cost, not a shortage. MTN's MoMoPay page describes a merchant charge of 1% for an Individual Merchant and 2% for a Business Merchant; cash withdrawals carry the agent fee and the 0.5% withdrawal duty shown on the tariff table. Book the month's fees as a single bank and mobile money charges expense.
4. Transfers last. Money moved to the bank is not a sale and not an expense; it is a transfer between two accounts. Airtel says standing-order liquidations usually take 24 to 48 hours to reflect, so a transfer sent on the last day of the month may appear on next month's bank statement. Record it on the day you sent it and tick it off when the bank shows it.

Reversals: write them down the same day

MTN's merchant menu includes a reverse transaction option that needs the transaction ID. A reversal done at the counter and never noted in the sales system is the single most common reason a reconciliation fails. Make the rule simple: no reversal without a refund recorded against the original sale, with the operator's transaction ID typed in the note.

When a payment is genuinely missing

Uganda's National Payment Systems (Consumer Protection) Regulations, 2022 set timeframes for licensed providers to resolve enquiries. The Schedule gives six hours for electronic money funds transfers and for card or merchant payments, counted from the time the enquiry is lodged, and requires the provider's channels (phone, help desk, email or web chat) to be available around the clock. If the provider's decision does not satisfy you, the regulations let you complain to the Bank of Uganda within thirty days of that decision, in writing, with your evidence. Keep the transaction ID, the time and the amount; that is the evidence.

Keep the workings

The Tax Procedures Code Act requires every taxpayer to keep records that let their tax liability be readily ascertained and to retain them for five years after the end of the tax period they relate to. A reconciliation file (sales report, operator statement, list of differences and how each was resolved) is exactly the kind of record that turns a URA query into a ten-minute conversation.

A realistic target

Aim for a difference you can explain, not for zero. A month that ends with "statement is UGX 48,000 lower than sales: two payments to the owner's personal number on the 12th and 19th, now transferred" is a reconciled month. A month that ends with "about right" is not.

Sources

1. https://www.mtn.co.ug/helppersonal/momopay/
2. https://cdn-webportal.airtelstream.net/website/uganda/assets/pdf/Airtel-Money-Pay-Merchant-FAQs-2026.pdf
3. https://www.mtn.co.ug/tariffs/mobile-money-tariffs/
4. https://commons.laws.africa/akn/ug/act/si/2022/103/media/publication/ug-act-si-2022-103-publication-document.pdf
5. https://www.rsm.global/uganda/insights/tax-insights/key-highlights-tax-procedures-code-act