Accounting Software for NGOs and Charities in Kenya

A grant from one donor, an unrestricted gift from a local business and members' contributions all land in the same account at your bank. Then a donor asks how their KES 2.4 million was spent, and someone spends a weekend colour-coding a spreadsheet to reconstruct it. Without fund tracking built into the ledger, restricted money and general money blur together and you can't answer honestly without guesswork.

One funder wants spend against a budget line by quarter. Another wants it by activity. A third wants receipts attached. Your treasurer rebuilds the same numbers three times in three formats, and each rebuild is a fresh chance for a typo. Meanwhile the board wants a simple statement of income and expenditure that nobody has time to produce.

Programme staff pay for transport, venue hire, airtime and casual labour in the field, often by M-PESA. Receipts arrive as photos on WhatsApp weeks later, or not at all. By audit time you are chasing people for evidence of spending that happened four months ago, and unsupported expenses are exactly what auditors and donors flag first.

Charitable status does not automatically make you exempt from everything. If you run a training programme, a consultancy arm, a shop or a guesthouse, that trading income may count toward the KES 5,000,000 taxable turnover threshold for VAT registration with KRA. Add PAYE and statutory deductions for staff plus withholding tax on some payments, and small teams end up either over-worrying or missing something.

Tag income and expenses to a fund, grant or project as you record them, so restricted and unrestricted money stay separate in the ledger — not in a side spreadsheet. At any moment you can see how much of a specific grant is committed, spent and remaining. When a donor asks, the answer is a report you pull in seconds, backed by the same figures your annual accounts use.

Run income and expenditure by fund, by project, by budget line or by period from your live data, then export to PDF or spreadsheet for a donor pack or a board meeting. Because every report is built from the same ledger, your quarterly donor report and your year-end accounts can never quietly disagree. Give your auditor a login too — unlimited users means read access costs you nothing extra.

Programme staff photograph a receipt in the Tallium AI mobile app and the AI reads the supplier, date, amount and tax, then suggests the category and the project to charge it to. The image stays attached to the transaction as your audit evidence. No more month-end receipt hunts, and no more expenses that nobody can explain.

If part of your work is taxable, Tallium AI keeps VAT-coded transactions separate from your exempt and grant-funded activity, so the figures behind a VAT3 return in iTax are already organised when you need them, and eTIMS-compliant invoicing for your billable work sits in the same app. Whether your specific activities are taxable, exempt or zero-rated depends on your registration and what you actually supply — confirm current rules with KRA or a local tax professional before you register or file.