Paynecta charges a percentage of each payment you successfully collect. That fee comes out of a credit balance you hold with us.

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Buying credit

From Credit in your dashboard, choose an amount and we send an M-Pesa prompt to your phone. When you enter your PIN, the credit appears on your balance.
Buying credit does not go through your public payment page. You are signed in, on your own account, paying us: the number is yours and already proved.
You can charge a different phone. The one holding the float is not always the one holding the login. A new number is proved once with a code and remembered after that, so the second top-up from it is just a top-up.
Top-ups are charged by M-Pesa, so the number has to be Safaricom. There is no STK prompt on another network.

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What you are charged

1% of each payment you collect, unless we have agreed something else with you. The rate can carry a smallest and largest fee where that has been agreed. You are charged only when a payment succeeds. A customer who cancels, runs out of funds, or never answers the prompt costs you no percentage fee. A change to the rate applies to payments from then on. A payment already charged keeps the rate it was charged at, so a statement from March still adds up after a change in April.

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Messages, and why they will be charged for

This is a change we are making, not how billing works today. Nothing below is being charged yet, and we will tell you before it starts.
Every verification code is an SMS we pay a network to deliver. Today that cost sits entirely with us, which means a page that sends a thousand codes and collects nothing is free to the business sending them. That is not a gap we can leave open: it is the same gap somebody would use to send codes to numbers that are not customers at all. So a message will cost one credit when it is sent, and that credit is given back when the payment succeeds.

The payment goes through

The credit is returned. You pay the percentage you agreed and nothing else, exactly as you do now.

The payment does not

The credit stays spent. One message, one credit, whether it was a wrong number or a customer who changed their mind.
For a business whose payments complete, this changes nothing at all: the credit comes straight back. It only bites where codes are being sent that were never going to become payments.

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What this means in practice

  • Check the number before you send. A digit typed wrong sends a code to a stranger who will never complete anything, and that message is spent.
  • Send when the customer is ready. A prompt that arrives while somebody is looking for their phone often expires unanswered.
  • Do not send speculatively. A code is not a way to check whether a number works, and it never was.
There is more on all of this in Codes and messages.

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Reading your statement

Every line says what it was for and points at what caused it: The balance is what those lines add up to. Nothing sets it directly, which is why it can always be explained by the lines above it.

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Running out

On a prepaid account, an empty balance stops collection. Your payment page tells customers the business cannot accept payments at the moment; your dashboard tells you exactly why, and we email you before it happens rather than once trading has stopped. Some accounts are on invoice instead, with a limit agreed in advance. Those trade below zero down to that limit and are billed later.

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Next

Your customers

Who has paid you, and what they have paid.

Getting paid

Where collections settle, and how to change it.