How to get a Lipa na M-PESA paybill or till number

How does Lipa na M-PESA work?

Lipa na M-PESA is the business side of M-PESA. Rather than sending money to a person, the customer pays a number belonging to a business, and it settles into a business account instead of a personal wallet. It comes in two shapes, Paybill and Buy Goods, and the difference between them is whether the customer has to type an account number.

That single difference decides most of what follows, so it is worth settling before you apply rather than after.

Paybill or Buy Goods?

Paybill asks the customer for two things: your business number and an account number. That second field is the point of it. It is what lets you tell which invoice, which tenant, which student or which order a payment belongs to, without asking the payer afterwards. Utilities, schools, landlords and anyone issuing invoices want this.

Buy Goods, the till number, asks only for the amount. It is faster at a counter, there is one less thing for a customer to mistype, and it gives you no attribution beyond the time of the payment and who sent it. Shops, restaurants, salons and market traders generally want this.

The wrong choice is recoverable but expensive in the ordinary sense: you reconcile by hand every month, or you print new signage. Pick on whether you will need to answer what was this payment for months later.

What Safaricom asks for

You apply as a business, through Safaricom's business portal, a Safaricom shop, or your account manager if you have one. The shape of what they want is consistent even though the details move: evidence that the business exists, evidence that you are entitled to act for it, and tax identification.

In practice that means business registration documents, a KRA PIN, and identification for the signatories, along with the bank account the money will settle into. There is usually a signed application form and a nominated administrator for the account.

Confirm the current list with Safaricom before you gather anything. We are deliberately not publishing a checklist here: those requirements change, a stale list is worse than none, and being turned away at a shop with the wrong papers costs a day. Treat this page as the shape of the process, and Safaricom as the authority on its contents.

Activation, and the mistake to avoid

Activation is a review, not a switch. Plan in days rather than minutes, and longer again if anything on the application needs correcting.

The mistake worth naming: do not print anything carrying the number until it is live and you have paid real money into it yourself. A number that is issued but not yet active, or a digit transcribed wrongly onto a banner, is discovered by a customer at the counter, and by then the signage exists.

If you are not ready for a paybill yet

A sole trader can be paid on a personal number, and Pochi la Biashara exists to keep those business receipts from mixing with personal money. For a market stall or a one-person service business that is a reasonable place to start.

The reasons to move up to Lipa na M-PESA later are reconciliation, letting staff take payments without handing over a personal SIM, and attribution. Not the ability to receive money, which you already have.

What to do with the number once you have it

The number is only useful where a customer meets it, which is signage, invoices, a menu, a delivery note, a shelf edge. This is where most of the avoidable losses happen, because a number is retyped by hand and a mistyped digit is money sent somewhere else.

A QR code removes the typing, and the specifics of encoding an M-PESA payment are covered in the M-PESA QR code guide. Before that, though, it is worth understanding that a payment QR and a link QR are different things that look identical on paper, which is covered in Safaricom's own QR versus a link QR.

Whatever you print, print it once. A paybill can be superseded, a business can move to a till, and a campaign can outlive the number on it. Anything encoding the number directly has to be reprinted when that happens; anything encoding a link you control does not.