What the Finance menu does for your school
The fees you charge, the money you receive, the wages you pay and the store revenue waiting to be transferred — in one set of books.
Finance is the money desk of the administration portal. It holds everything that enters or leaves the school’s books: the fees you charge each class, the payments families hand over at the counter, the store revenue Ekati transfers to your mobile money number, the wages you pay your staff, and the bills the school pays as a business.
Three people normally live in this menu. The bursar owns the figures and runs the month end. The secretary takes the fees at the counter and issues the receipts. The head of school opens the finance dashboard to see whether the month is covered before signing anything.
Nothing here is entered twice. A payment recorded at the counter is the same money that appears in the period figures, in the fee clearance of the learner and in the store revenue waiting to be paid out. That is why the screens are worth learning in the order below: price first, collect second, check third, pay out last.
The eight screens in Finance
Each one answers a different question about money.
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Collect
Payments and receipts
Record cash, mobile money and bank receipts and hand the family its PDF receipt.
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Check
Payment reconciliation
Match what the mobile money operator reported against the rows in your ledger.
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Sell
Orders and promo codes
Track the courses and books sold on the store and the discounts applied.
How the money moves through the menu
One direction is what the school receives. The other is what the school owes.
What comes in
You decide the price in Fee structures: one grid per class per academic year, cut into instalments. Families pay against those instalments, and the payment is recorded in Payments with a receipt in your school’s colours. Mobile money confirmations arrive on their own and are settled by Payment reconciliation. Sales made on the Ekati store appear as Orders, and the money behind them is carried to your number by Payouts.
What goes out
Payroll pays the people: the monthly wage run is calculated from the teaching hours recorded and verified in the execution logbooks. Expenditures pays everyone else: supplies, transport, repairs, printing, rent, internet. Each outgoing payment carries a category and, wherever you have one, the receipt that justifies it.
Two sets of books, never mixed. Fee income and store revenue are counted separately, on purpose. A family paying school fees never feeds the balance that is transferred to your mobile money number, and a store sale never appears as fee income. That is why the store balance can sit at zero while the school is collecting fees perfectly well — and it is also why a good month at the counter does not by itself mean a transfer is coming.
A normal week in Finance
The rhythm is simple once the screens are in the right order.
Every school day: take the fees
Open Enrollments, open the learner, and use the Add Payment dialog. Pick the instalment being paid, confirm the method and the reference, and download the receipt before the family leaves the desk. Close the day in Payments: that list is your day sheet, and it shows the cashier behind every line.
Midweek, weekly and month end
Midweek, compare the mobile money statements of MTN or Orange against the pending rows. Anything the operator confirmed should already have moved by itself; anything still pending after a day is worth a phone call.
Weekly, check Payouts once the balance for a method reaches the minimum — Ekati has transferred it to the number registered under Configurations — and read the status history if a transfer looks stuck.
Month end, make sure the month’s logbooks are verified, run Generate Payroll, read the figures, and mark each row paid as the money goes out. Then review Expenditures against the categories you budgeted for.
What the platform does so you do not have to
Three calculations that are worth trusting instead of rebuilding in a spreadsheet.
Fee clearance is calculated for you
For every enrolled learner, Ekati compares what has been paid against what was expected on the day they were enrolled. While the difference is positive the learner is pending or partial; the moment the two figures meet, the file is cleared and the next step in their schooling or application is allowed to proceed. You never adjust a balance by hand.
Receipts carry your school’s identity. Every receipt is generated as a PDF with your school’s name, address, logo, the learner’s details, the instalment being paid, the cashier and the signature lines. Set the logo, the watermark, the footer message and an optional payment template once in Configurations and every receipt afterwards is already branded.
History is never quietly rewritten. A recorded payment, a paid payroll line and a verified logbook entry are kept as they were entered. When something was typed in error, the honest repair is a new, visible entry that explains itself — never the disappearance of an old one. That is what makes the figures defensible when a parent, an auditor or a board asks where the money went.
Finance questions
The things school owners and bursars ask before their first month end.
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What is the difference between a fee payment and a store order?
A fee payment is money a family hands to the school for a learner’s fees, recorded against an instalment in Payments and receipted on the spot. A store order is a purchase made on the Ekati store — a course or a book — paid by the buyer’s own mobile money and listed in Orders. They are counted separately: only store revenue reaches your mobile money balance for a weekly transfer.
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Which mobile money number receives our store revenue?
The one your institution admin registered under Configurations, in the Payouts tab. There is one destination per method — MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money — and Ekati transfers the available balance to that number each week once it reaches the minimum. If you change the number, the next weekly transfer goes to the new one.
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I entered a payment wrongly. Should I delete it?
No. A payment that has been receipted is part of the school’s history and stays in the books. Record a correcting entry instead — a second payment line on the same learner with a new reference — and explain it in the Note field. The balance recalculates from the entries you have, so the correction is visible to anyone who reads the learner’s payment history.
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How do I know if my fee instalments are right?
Open the fee structure and look at the running total above the instalment rows: it shows the sum of your rows against the expected total, and the Save button stays disabled until the two are exactly equal. A school year priced at 175 000 XAF split as 60 000, 60 000 and 55 000 XAF balances perfectly; 60 000, 60 000 and 55 000.50 does not.