Revenue reporting and profit & loss

Collections, reconciled

Every payment is recorded against the subscriber who made it, with the M-Pesa receipt alongside. That matters at month end, because the test of a revenue report is whether it agrees with your M-Pesa statement — and if the two disagree, one of them is wrong and you need to know which.

Costs, which is the unusual part

Bandwidth, rent, power, salaries, hardware — recorded in the same place as the revenue they produced. Plenty of ISP billing systems stop at collections and leave the other side of the ledger to a spreadsheet that quietly stops being updated around March.

• Recurring costs that repeat each month without being re-entered.
• One-off costs against the month they fell in, so a router purchase does not distort a year.
• Profit and loss over the period you choose, rather than a revenue figure you have to mentally discount.

Per-site, because averages hide the problem

An ISP running three locations usually has one carrying the others. A single revenue number hides that; revenue and cost per site is what tells you whether the third site is worth keeping.