M-PESA App Adds Feature To Track Individual Transactions in Statements

You folks have been wanting the return of M-Ledger for a while. And at the risk of flogging a dead horse, let me remind you that the ship has sailed, and you need to move on.

And not that Safaricom has left you high and dry, because while the company has made controversial decisions before, namely axing M-Ledger, it appears that it is slowly and surely sprinkling some of its features in its modern app.

The M-PESA app went live this week after many months of testing. We have since dived into its offerings extensively. That means that if the app receives a noteworthy feature, we let you know about it like the good people we are.

READ MORE: M-PESA APP COVERAGE

The last week launch did not bring anything new or substantial to the table other than what the app had been doing prior to its official roll-out.

However, it is what that came out later that has necessitated the publication of this post.

On its launch day, some things went wrong with the M-PESA service altogether, and we guessed that folks at Safaricom were just making sure that everything was in order. Of course, order was restored later on.

After which, we received two major updates for the M-PESA app, and mySafaricom (read more about the mySafaricom update here. TLDR, it has a dark mode now).

Now, the M-PESA app is now better following these two new additions:

1. The app launches quicker now. Not in terms of speed, but how it takes you to the home page after you have entered your PIN or biometrics authentication. The sluggishness was an issue for many before; the app would take its sweet time to open, and in some instances, it would fail or crash. This is no longer a problem.
2. The second feature is sorting out through your M-PESA statements. Before I expand, here is what M-Ledger could do before it went away:

M-Ledger could fetch transactions from more than 6 months prior, and that was at launch. Later updates allowed it to go back as far as five years by transaction history all from Safaricom Cloud. You could transact a transaction by searching through the history using elements such as a user’s name. You also could do nifty things like zero down on people you financially interacted with, and other features such as who receives the most money from you. Heck, you could even tell how much you had transacted over a given period, say annually in terms of sent and received funds, and by person.

To this end, the M-PESA app update allows you to do most of these things, in a way.

The appears to be fetching statements from as far as April 2021 (in my case). Something I am yet to establish is whether the reconciliation is done from my text messages, or the information is being pulled from the Cloud (confirmation is incoming). Terrific, right?

The second part is that you can search through the statements; say you want to record how much money you have sent, say your parent, you can do that. Unfortunately, the statement does not give you the totals for those transactions, but at least, you can track them.

These features are important to a lot of people, and we hope that Safaricom will continue adding them in the M-PESA app in the coming days.