Payments & Fintech
M-Pesa/Daraja, cards and reconciliation - the callbacks that never arrive, the error codes nobody documents, and handling money correctly.
Sub-topics
M-Pesa & Daraja
26The Daraja API, its error codes and the things the docs leave out.
STK Push
13Prompts that never reach the phone, timeouts and the failure codes.
Reconciliation & Webhooks
10Callbacks, status queries, orphaned payments and keeping the books straight.
Cards & Money Handling
4Stripe, Paystack, idempotency, rounding and not charging twice.
32 articles · showing 1-9 (page 1 of 4)
Your spare Android phone is a payment gateway: an offline-first SMS relay for M-Pesa
M-Pesa till confirmations arrive as an SMS, and Daraja is not open to every merchant. So we turned a spare Android phone into a self-hosted SMS-to-HTTP gateway: encrypted on-device, HMAC-signed on the wire, and built so that it never loses a message.
A payment source, not a payment parser: what keeping the pipe dumb actually buys
The SMS gateway could have extracted the M-Pesa transaction code on the phone. It deliberately does not. Here is what that bought, what it cost, and the boundary question every integration eventually has to answer: where does meaning belong?
Daraja API in Production: STK Push, C2B and B2C With Callbacks That Actually Work
A build-order guide to Safaricom's Daraja API with real payloads: OAuth token caching, STK Push, C2B v2 registration, B2C v3 with RSA security credentials, and the callback URL rules nobody documents.
POS System Kenya: Why UpeoRetail Fits How Shops Really Sell
Looking for a POS system in Kenya that survives real trade? UpeoRetail gives shops, minimarts and distributors fast checkout, honest stock, multi-branch visibility and M-Pesa payments on a hardened ERPNext backbone.
Your M-Pesa Callback Will Fire Twice: Idempotency, Retries and the 1037 Problem
Daraja callbacks are unreliable notifications, not a source of truth. Seven production failure modes, with the database constraints, pollers and parsers that make double charges structurally impossible.
Property Management Software Kenya: ISHI for Landlords
ISHI is a rent management system for Kenyan landlords, agents and property managers: automated invoicing, M-Pesa allocation, water billing with a field agent portal, tenant self-service and arrears dashboards.
M-Pesa Reconciliation That Scales: From Paybill Statement to Trial Balance
Stop reconciling in spreadsheets. A three-way match between the Safaricom statement, your callback events and a double-entry ledger, with named break categories and a daily close job in Python and SQL.
Enterprise Integrations: Connecting M-Pesa and APIs to Your ERP
M-Pesa callbacks, payment matching, e-commerce sync and eTIMS. The patterns that survive production - idempotency, queues, raw payload logs and reconciliation - and the ones that create duplicate receipts.
Build a Payments Port, Not a Daraja Wrapper: Provider-Agnostic Money Movement in Africa
The right payments abstraction is a normalised state machine plus a normalised event, not a charge() function. Ports, adapters, webhook signature handling, minor-unit traps and config-driven routing.