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Every transaction has a fee. What differs between accounts is who pays it — and that changes what the amounts in your API responses and webhooks mean. Get this wrong and your books won’t balance: you’ll either think a recipient was paid more than they were, or count a fee you were never charged.

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Who pays the fee

There are three arrangements. Yours is set per wallet when your account is configured.

Your customer pays it

The fee comes out of the transaction itself.

You pay it from your wallet

Your customer gets the full amount; the fee is taken from your wallet.

You're invoiced for it

Your customer gets the full amount; we bill you for fees separately.

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What that looks like

A payout of 500 KES with a 20 KES fee: Same request, same fee, and your recipient gets a different amount. This is the part worth checking before you go live.
If your customer pays the fee and you tell your end user “you will receive 500”, you are wrong by the fee every time. Quote them transactionAmount, not the amount you requested.

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Collections work the other way round

On a payout the fee comes off the amount. On a collection it goes on top, because your customer has to cover both the payment and the fee. So collecting 1,000 with a 25 fee reports transaction_amount of 1025, not 975. If you assume collections behave like payouts, your reconciliation will be out by twice the fee.

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Reading the amounts

transactionAmount is not your wallet debit. It’s the amount sent to your recipient. Don’t assume a fixed relationship between these three fields — read all of them and your integration stays correct on any arrangement, including one you get moved to later.

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Rounding

Some currencies are quoted in whole units, others to two decimal places, and we round fees and amounts to match.
  • Whole units — KES, UGX, TZS and similar. A fee of 19.6 becomes 20.
  • Two decimals — USD, and other currencies normally quoted with cents.
Rounding happens on the fee first, then the amounts are derived from it, so the numbers you receive always add up exactly. You won’t see a one-unit discrepancy between the fee and the amounts.
Don’t build your own rounding on top of ours. Use the values we return rather than recalculating from amount and a fee percentage — you’ll drift by a unit.

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Finding your arrangement

You can see this in the dashboard for each of your wallets. It’s set per wallet, and can differ between collections and payouts on the same wallet — so check both if you do both. The dashboard is also where you see which countries and currencies you’re live in, and where you request new ones. If your reconciliation doesn’t match one of the three patterns above, talk to support before writing workarounds.