Billing a residential waste collection round
Bill every household on the round the same monthly fee, deliver it to the phone they use, and know exactly which houses the truck is carrying for free - without a collections clerk.
How it runs
1 run
every household on the round billed at once
- A whole round billed on the 1st, chased by the 10th.
- 1 run — every household on the round billed at once
- 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
A residential round is a fixed cost and a variable income. The truck, the fuel and the crew are the same whether 400 households paid or 260 did. The fee is small enough that nobody wants to spend an evening chasing it, so the bill is a WhatsApp message typed by hand, the record is a notebook, and a household that stops paying is usually noticed months later - by which point they are a habit, not a debtor.
What actually breaks
- Bills are typed one household at a time, so some months only half the round gets billed at all
- Payments arrive into the paybill in small amounts on random days, with no reliable way to tell whose is whose
- Nobody can answer "who has not paid this month" without reading back through messages
- Households that quietly stopped paying keep getting collected, because the crew has no list
Set the round up once
Every household on the round is an account with its house or plot number, service address, category and fee. Group them into zones for the estate or neighbourhood and routes for the round the truck actually drives, so arrears later come back grouped the way your crews work rather than as one long list. There is no meter to read - the charge is the same fee on the same cycle - so setup is the customer list and the fee, and nothing else.
Different households can pay different amounts without becoming a special case: set a fee per category so a single-room unit, a family home and a small shop on the same street each carry their own rate.
Bill the whole round in one action
A billing run raises every household's bill for the cycle at once and stops at reviewed, so you see the exceptions - an account with no fee set, a household added mid-month - before anything is sent. Post it and the whole round is billed. Two independent guards make billing the same month twice impossible, so an interrupted run is safe to repeat. When it finishes you get a summary: bills posted, total billed, how many reached customers by email, SMS and WhatsApp, and what needs attention.
A household that joins part-way through a cycle is prorated rather than charged a full month, and one that pauses collection stops being billed without being deleted from the round.
Get paid on the phone they already use
Every bill carries an M-Pesa pay link. The customer opens it, enters their number and approves the prompt - no account, no app. Bills are delivered by SMS, WhatsApp or email, which for a residential round usually means the message lands on the same phone that will make the payment thirty seconds later.
Most small payments still arrive straight into your paybill or till. Upload the statement - CSV, Excel, or a PDF the bank emailed you - and Zana reads every deposit, proposes the household it settles, and posts only what you confirm. Re-uploading the same file changes nothing. A payment quoting a house number clears that household's oldest bill first, so the ones who pay a bit at a time work down their balance in order.
Know which houses you are carrying for free
Arrears are aged 30, 60 and 90 days and grouped by zone and route, so the answer to "who is behind" is a list per round rather than a spreadsheet for the whole business. You get a collection rate, a ranked debtor list, and reminders that go out automatically to the households that are late - which is usually enough, because the fee is small and most people simply forgot. What is left is a short list worth a phone call, and a decision about whether the truck still stops there.
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.