How Jamvi reads your M-Pesa without guessing

The rule it will not break: no guessing about your money

A budget that is quietly wrong is worse than no budget. So Jamvi recognises the M-Pesa message and statement formats it has actually been taught, one family at a time. When it meets something it does not know, it says so and leaves that line out with a reason. It never invents an answer.

A message it cannot read can be sent to the Jamvi team, so a later update understands it.

Two ways in

Paste your messages. Select as many M-Pesa messages as you like, copy them and paste them in, or share them straight to Jamvi on Android. Jamvi reads them to fill in the list and does not keep them.

Or bring the statement PDF. Choose the file and type its password. The PDF is read on your own phone or computer. It is never uploaded, and neither is the password.

Both end in the same place: a list you check, and a Save button. Nothing is recorded until you press it.

Reading a statement is harder than it looks

A statement is a table drawn on a page, and the details of one payment often wrap over several lines. Read as plain text, amounts land in the wrong column about half the time. So Jamvi works from the exact position of every piece of text on the page.

Where the statement itself mirrors its columns, as it does for a payment made with Fuliza, Jamvi decides which way the money went from what the row says it is.

Fuliza is handled properly

What a Fuliza loan paid for is your spending, so it is recorded as a normal payment. The loan itself and its repayments are not spending or income, so they are left out, and Jamvi tells you how many it left out.

It checks its own arithmetic

Before it will use a statement, Jamvi checks that every payment follows from the balance before it. If it does not add up, Jamvi refuses the file instead of recording wrong amounts.

After you choose what to save, it compares the result with the statement's opening and closing balance and lists what makes up any difference, such as Fuliza repayments or entries you did not tick, so nothing disappears quietly.

Money that is not income and not spending

A payment from your bank into M-Pesa and on to another bank is not income and not spending. A loan from your own company is not income. Money you lend is not a cost.

So every line can be a move between your own accounts, a debt or loan with a person or a company, money into savings, or a member's contribution to a group. Each is recorded as what it is. Jamvi offers to update the balances that follow, and never does it behind your back.

It learns a little, and you stay in charge

The category of a payment is suggested from your own books: the payee you paid before, a payee with a similar name, or a word that has nearly always meant one category in your history. You can ask Jamvi to remember a choice, and see and forget what it has remembered.

Suggestions are always marked as Jamvi's, and yours always win. You can also save some entries now and the rest another day; anything already recorded is recognised and never counted twice.