Water billing for estates, apartments and gated communities
Bill every unit for the water it actually used. Submeter readings captured on a phone, a tariff applied per unit, and one bill per tenant collected on M-Pesa - instead of splitting the bulk bill and hoping.
How it runs
1 bulk meter
split across every unit, by what each one actually used
- One bulk meter in, one metered bill per unit out.
- 1 bulk meter — split across every unit, by what each one actually used
- Same customers, same ledger, one follow-up trail
Who this is for
If you run Property management and bill the same customers again and again, this page is for you.
- Water Billing
- Property management
The estate has one bulk meter from the utility and a submeter on every unit. The bill arrives as a single number, and someone has to turn it into a charge per tenant. Most estates do this in a spreadsheet: walk the block with a notebook, type the readings in, subtract last month, multiply by a rate, and send each tenant a WhatsApp message. It works until a tenant disputes a reading, a unit changes hands mid-month, or the difference between the bulk meter and the sum of the submeters quietly becomes money the estate is paying for and nobody is billing.
Where it goes wrong
- Readings live in a notebook first and a spreadsheet second, so a mis-keyed digit is only found when a tenant argues
- A unit that changes tenant mid-cycle gets billed to the wrong person, or to nobody
- There is no record of what a meter read last month other than the spreadsheet row someone overwrote
- Tenants pay into the estate paybill at random and matching those deposits back to units is a monthly evening's work
Set it up the way the property is laid out
Model the property the way you walk it: zones for blocks or phases, and routes nested under each zone for the round a caretaker actually does. Each unit is an account carrying its unit number, service address, category, tariff, zone and route. Meters belong to accounts, so a unit with a separate garden or commercial submeter can hold more than one, and replacing a faulty submeter records the old closing register and the new opening register instead of producing a nonsense first bill.
Capture readings on a phone, with the photo attached
Whoever reads the meters uses the installable field app: point the camera at the submeter and it reads the register digits for confirmation - the reader always checks the number before saving, and the photo is banked either way. When a tenant disputes a charge four months later, the photo of their own meter on the day it was read ends the conversation.
Readings taken in a basement or a back court with no signal queue offline on the device and sync when the phone finds a network. Before anything is billed, Zana flags what is worth a second look: a reading lower than last time is held as an anomaly rather than billed as negative, consumption more than 3x the unit's recent average is flagged, and a submeter that has rolled over past its digits is caught. Field submissions land as pending verification until someone with the right role approves them.
Charge what your tariff says, per unit
Set the tariff once and it applies to every unit: a flat rate per unit of water, or tiered bands if you price heavy users differently, plus a standing charge for the fixed share of the bulk bill, a minimum charge floor for units that sat empty, and levies as a percentage or a fixed amount. A vacant unit still gets a statement, so the standing charge is never a surprise when the tenant returns.
Bill the whole property in one run
A billing run builds every unit's bill and stops at reviewed so you see the exceptions first - a unit with no reading, an unapproved reading, a meter that was swapped, a new tenant with no tariff. Fix them, then post. Two independent guards make re-billing a month impossible, so a run that was interrupted can be safely repeated. When it finishes the property manager gets a summary: bills posted, total billed, how many reached tenants by email, SMS and WhatsApp, and the accounts that need attention.
Collect, reconcile and see the shortfall
Each bill carries an M-Pesa pay link, and a tenant paying against their unit reference clears their oldest bill first. For tenants who pay straight into the estate paybill, upload the statement: Zana reads every deposit, proposes the unit it belongs to, and posts only what you confirm. From there you get arrears aged by block and route, a collection rate, and a ranked list of the units actually behind - which is the number the service charge meeting needs, not an estimate.
What you’ll need
Water billing runs on every paid plan from Starter - KES 2,000/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
Water Billing is billing and collection. It does not cover:
- automatic meter telemetry
- prepaid vending
- hydraulic network or water-quality operations
- inventory
- a full customer portal
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.