Billing commercial waste collection contracts
Bill offices, restaurants, markets and estates on monthly collection contracts at the rate each one agreed, collect on M-Pesa or bank, and chase the accounts that are late without chasing the ones that are not.
How it runs
Per contract
each customer billed the rate they actually agreed
- Every contract billed at its own rate, on its own cycle.
- Per contract — each customer billed the rate they actually agreed
- Same customers, same ledger, one follow-up trail
Who this is for
If you run Waste collection and bill the same customers again and again, this page is for you.
- Waste Billing
- Waste collection
Commercial waste is a different business from a residential round. There are fewer customers, each one pays considerably more, the rate was negotiated rather than published, and the customer is a business that expects a proper invoice with a VAT figure on it before finance will release a payment. Miss a month and nobody calls to remind you - the invoice simply never gets raised, and a year later the contract has quietly been running below what it should have earned.
Where commercial contracts leak money
- Each customer has their own agreed rate, so billing is done by hand from a list somebody maintains
- An invoice that is never raised is never chased, and nobody notices for months
- Business customers pay by bank transfer or cheque, and matching those to contracts means reading a statement line by line
- Finance departments will not pay an informal message - they need an invoice, a reference and a receipt
Every contract at its own rate
Each business on your book is an account carrying its own fee by category - a restaurant on daily collection, an office block on twice a week, a market stall on a smaller rate - so the negotiated price is stored against the customer rather than remembered by whoever raises the bills. Group them into zones and routes the way your trucks actually run, so arrears and collection rates come back per round.
Every bill carries 16% VAT applied and shown correctly, and your paybill, till, bank transfer and cheque instructions are printed on the invoice itself - so a finance clerk who has never spoken to you can pay it the way their process requires.
The month bills itself
A billing run raises the whole book at once and stops at reviewed so you can see the exceptions before anything reaches a customer - a contract with no rate, an account added mid-cycle, a customer paused for the holidays. Post it and every invoice is raised, delivered and recorded. A contract that starts part-way through a month is prorated. Guards on the run make double-billing a period impossible, which matters more here than anywhere: a duplicate invoice to a corporate customer costs a credit conversation and a delayed payment on the real one.
Invoices go out by email with the PDF attached and a pay link inside, and by SMS or WhatsApp to the person who actually approves payment.
Collect on whichever rail finance uses
The pay link takes M-Pesa STK push and card, which covers the smaller accounts on the day the bill lands. Larger customers will pay by bank transfer or into your paybill against a reference - upload the statement, including a scanned PDF, and Zana reads every incoming transaction, proposes the invoice it settles and waits for you to confirm before posting. Duplicate-import guards mean re-uploading the same statement changes nothing. A payment quoting the account reference clears the oldest invoice first, and anything over is banked as credit against next cycle.
A branded PDF receipt is raised and emailed the moment a payment settles, and any customer can be handed a statement for any date range - which is what a finance department asks for at year end.
Chase the ones that are actually late
Arrears are aged 30, 60 and 90 days with a ranked debtor list and a collection rate per route, so a two-month-old office block does not hide behind two hundred paid-up accounts. Reminders go out automatically on the schedule you set. Because every invoice, part payment and write-off posts to one double-entry ledger, the arrears figure and the revenue figure reconcile with each other rather than being two numbers you have to explain.
What you’ll need
Waste billing runs on every paid plan from Starter - KES 1,000/month for up to 100 billable accounts. Larger operations move up the tiers to Utility (7,500 accounts), and beyond that to Enterprise.
See every tierWhat this doesn’t do
Waste Collection Billing is billing and collection. It does not cover:
- route optimisation
- vehicles, drivers, or crew dispatch
- collection stops or service calendars
- proof of collection and missed-pickup workflows
- bin or container inventory
- weighbridge records and weight-based rating
If you need any of these, tell us before you sign up — we’d rather say so now than in month two.
The parts of Zana doing the work here
Run this on Zana
Set up in minutes — no card required — or book a walkthrough mapped to your billing cycle.