Reconciling MTN MoMo and Orange Money payments in Cameroon shops

It is 8 pm and the shop is closing. The till says 480,000 FCFA in sales; the drawer holds 205,000 FCFA. The rest is “on the phones”: an MTN MoMo number, an Orange Money number, and a few text messages the cashier scrolls through to show that everything came in.

Nobody knows whether the day actually balances. If there is a gap, it will surface a week later, when nobody remembers the customer who had “already paid by MoMo”.

Mobile Money made collecting payments easier and controlling them harder: the money no longer lands in a drawer you can count, but in an account you cannot see. Here is a reconciliation method you can apply tonight, with or without software.

Why does Mobile Money make closing the till harder?

Cash can be counted. A Mobile Money payment leaves only an indirect trace: a notification on a phone, a line in a transaction history, sometimes nothing at all if the customer paid to a different number. Five features explain most of the trouble:

• Several operators. MTN MoMo and Orange Money each have their own number, history and fees.
• Mixed-up numbers. The shop’s number sometimes doubles as a personal one.
• Weak evidence. An SMS shown by a customer is not proof that the money arrived.
• Fees taken at source. The account balance is not the sum of the sales.
• Timing gaps. Does a payment received after closing belong to today or tomorrow?

Reconciling means dealing with these five points every day instead of discovering them at the end of the month.

Step 1: why open one journal per operator and per number?

Every place money can arrive gets its own journal: the list of movements for one means of payment, with its balance.

Three rules prevent most of the problems:

1. A number dedicated to the shop, in the business’s name, and never an employee’s personal number.
2. One number, one journal. Two shops or two MTN numbers means two MTN journals.
3. No personal use of the shop’s number. One family transfer in the middle of the day’s sales muddles the whole reconciliation.

Step 2: how do you record every payment with its reference?

The evening reconciliation is only as good as the day’s entries. For every Mobile Money payment, the till records:

• the exact payment method: MTN MoMo or Orange Money, not a vague “mobile”;
• the amount actually received;
• the transaction reference shown in the operator’s confirmation;
• where possible, the sender’s name or number.

When a customer pays partly in cash and partly by Mobile Money, the sale carries two payments, each in its own journal.

Step 3: how do you do the daily close in six moves?

The close happens every day, at a fixed time, by the person responsible for the till, and is checked by a second person.

1. Stop taking payments. Set a cut-off time: anything received after it belongs to the next day.
2. Count the cash by denomination, with two people, and write down the total.
3. Pull the day’s history for each Mobile Money number, from the operator’s merchant portal or app.
4. Compare, method by method, what the till expects with what was actually received.
5. Explain every gap, however small, noting its cause and the reference involved.
6. Sign off the close. The person in charge signs, and the owner receives the summary, whether in the shop or far away.

An explained gap is not a fault. An unexplained gap that keeps growing is.

Are fees and withdrawals sales or losses?

The balance of a Mobile Money number almost never equals the sum of the sales.

Fees. Depending on the account type and the operation, the operator charges fees on some incoming payments, on withdrawals or on transfers to a bank. These are expenses: they go to a dedicated account chosen with your accountant, not against sales. The applicable schedule is your operator’s, for your type of account.

Internal movements. When the manager takes money off the number for the till or the bank, that is a transfer between two journals: the Mobile Money journal goes down, the Cash or Bank journal goes up by the same amount, and only the fee is an expense. Left unrecorded, these movements widen the gap between the expected and the real balance every week.

A worked example: what does one day in a shop look like?

The amounts below are round figures chosen for illustration: they do not describe a real shop, and the fee used is not any operator’s actual rate. At closing time, the till and the counts show this, in FCFA:

The total shows a gap of only 5,000 FCFA. The detail reveals three.

Cash −5,000 and Orange Money +5,000. Same amount, opposite directions: the signature of a wrong payment method. The Orange Money history shows 5,000 FCFA received at 2:12 pm; the till recorded a sale for the same amount at 2:13 pm, as cash. Correct the payment method, and both gaps go to zero.

An MTN payment of 5,000 with no sale. A regular customer used MoMo to settle a credit invoice from the previous week. It is not today’s sale: record it as payment of that invoice.

An MTN sale of 10,000 with no payment. With that settlement set aside, 10,000 FCFA is missing: a sale recorded as MoMo whose reference does not exist in the history. This is the day’s only real problem. The amount goes to a suspense account, and the investigation starts that evening.

The next day, the manager transfers 100,000 FCFA from the MTN number to the bank. With, for the example, a 1,000 FCFA fee: the MTN journal falls by 101,000 FCFA, the bank rises by 100,000 FCFA and 1,000 FCFA goes to expenses. No sale, no loss.

What are the six causes of a mismatch, and how do you investigate?

Four rules make the investigation quick:

1. Start from the reference, the time and the amount, never from someone’s memory.
2. Deal with it the same day. The longer you wait, the harder the customer is to reach.
3. Keep a register of open gaps: date, amount, suspected cause, person responsible, outcome.
4. Watch the trends. One gap is an incident; the same gap on the same till every week is an internal-control issue.

What does software change, and what does it not?

This method works with a notebook and a spreadsheet; well-configured software makes it faster and more reliable. In Odoo, for instance, each point-of-sale payment method is linked to its own journal. Once the operator’s history is imported into that journal, each line is matched to a recorded payment; lines with no match stay in a suspense account until someone explains them. Odoo’s official documentation on reconciliation describes how this works in detail, and the page on point-of-sale payment methods how to set one method per operator.

What it does not change: someone still has to close the till every day, exporting the history depends on the operator, and a setup without separate journals reproduces the confusion of the notebook.

How can Nematek help?

Nematek One Mobile Money adds transaction import, reconciliation, exception handling and an approvals audit trail to Nematek One solutions. Payment integrations and third-party provider costs depend on the provider selected and are priced separately.

Through our Odoo ERP and digital transformation services, we set up journals and payment methods to match your numbers, then train the cashier and the manager on the daily close, in French or English. For the bigger picture, read our guide to Odoo ERP in Cameroon, or describe your situation in a free assessment request.