Keeping Track of Payments to Help Sinapis Scale Small, Growing Businesses in Africa
Integration has saved Sinapis staff hundreds of manual hours and ensures that all payment information is always accurate up-to-date to help Sinapis to run programs smoothly.
Sinapis is accelerating small business development across Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda with their innovative training program.
Sinapis found that small and growing businesses (those with 5 to 250 employees) account for up to 67-80% of new job growth in their respective economies. To help scale the impact of these businesses in their communities, Sinapis provides a range of programs to empower entrepreneurs.
Sinapis is a nonprofit organization that empowers aspiring entrepreneurs with innovative ideas by providing training, mentoring, consulting, and seed capital. Sinapis was one of the first organizations in Africa to start a program that trained entrepreneurs, including programs on developing business ideas, how to scale, and tools for accelerating growth.
To manage its programs, Sinapis uses multiple technologies to get the job done.
Sinapis provides a range of online and in-person professional development programs, mentorship opportunities, and trainings for thousands of entrepreneurs. Some programs offer elite training at affordable rates, and others are freely available to those who apply. To manage its program portfolio, Sinapis uses Salesforce to register entrepreneurs and track program activities. For payments, Sinapis relies on Kopo Kopo to collect M-Pesa and other mobile payment types from enrolled entrepreneurs. Kopo Kopo, however, was not integrated with Salesforce, so Sinapis staff had no easy way to track payments and outstanding balances.
OpenFn saves Sinapis management time by integrating payments data for real-time account monitoring.
When payments are made via Kopo Kopo, OpenFn…
- Automatically matches incoming payments with existing Sinapis accounts,
- Logs new payments and updates payment status in Salesforce,
- Updates account balances to help staff monitor outstanding balances and overdue payments.
This OpenFn-powered payment integration regularly saves Sinapis staff several hours of manual data entry work and ensures that all payment information is always accurate up-to-date. This helps Sinapis to run its programs more smoothly and focus on its mission to train 10,000 entrepreneurs. In 2018 and 2019 alone, Sinapis helped employ 4,863 people and impacted over 24,000 lives by creating jobs for those in extreme poverty.
Check out Sinapis’s 2018-2019 annual report to learn more about their impact.
The photo above was originally posted on the The Star. It features female entrepreneurs in Kenya undergoing Sinapis’s finance training.
Lei Lei Tun