brn-mwai/sarafu

Financial visibility for Kenya's 5.85M unlicensed MSMEs. Paste an M-Pesa statement, Claude parses it into a ledger and gives every line a business meaning, cash included, and turnover tax falls out of it. AI Mashinani 2026, Biashara track. # Sarafu **Financial visibility for the 5.85 million Kenyan businesses that have no books.** Paste an M-Pesa statement. Claude parses it into a real ledger, gives every line a business meaning, folds in the cash you entered by hand, and turns the whole thing into a dashboard and a turnover tax figure. Built for AI Mashinani 2026, Biashara track. --- ## The problem A Kenyan shopkeeper knows money came in today. She cannot tell you whether she made a profit this month. Her business runs on three ledgers that never meet: 1. **M-Pesa**, a flat list of money in and money out with no meaning attached. Nothing in it says which line was a sale and which was stock. 2. **Cash**, which leaves no record at all. 3. **Memory**, which is where margin, top customers and tax exposure actually live. Every accounting tool in Kenya assumes she already has what she does not have: a till number, a paybill, an accountant, or a formal registration. | Fact | Figure | | --- | --- | | MSMEs in Kenya | 7.41 million | | Of which unlicensed, entirely informal | **5.85 million** | | Share of all Kenyan businesses | 98% | | Fail within three years | 60 to 70% | | Collapsing annually, poor records a leading cause | 400,000+ | | MSME financing gap | **USD 19.3 billion** | | MSMEs with no access to credit | 67.9% | | SME transactions touching M-Pesa | over 90% | Sources in PROPOSAL.md. ## Why existing tools do not close it ZYNO Books, Qwan, Zoho Books Kenya edition and Auni all handle M-Pesa. Every one is built for the business that is **already formal**: paybill or till, active KRA PIN, often a bookkeeper. That is roughly 1.56 million businesses. The other 5.85 million are not underserved by those products, they are out of scope for them. Sarafu needs zero integration, zero registration and zero training. And it captures **cash**, which competitors ignore because cash has no API, which makes their picture of an informal business structurally incomplete. ## How it works ``` M-Pesa st …