Reference
The FARAGHA Definitive Guide
Every way to use it — from your first receipt to expert workflows.
Why this app is more versatile than it looks
FARAGHA looks like a one-trick tool: hide the balance, share the rest. That trick is genuinely the whole reason to open it the first time. But three things it does underneath — parsing (it understands six different M-PESA message shapes, not just "received"), tagging (freeform, multi-tag, user-defined), and reporting (per-tag and combined, computed live from whatever's been tagged) — combine into something with far more range than "redact and send." Almost everything below is just those three ingredients pointed at a different problem.
Nothing in this guide requires a feature that doesn't exist. Every use case is something you can do today, with the app as built.
Level 1 — Beginner: the first five minutes
1. Prove a payment without showing your balance
The core case. You sent money, someone wants proof, you don't want them seeing what's left in your account. Paste the message, generate, share.
2. Prove you received a payment
The mirror case — a customer paid you, you want a clean record without your balance attached to it.
3. Confirm a Paybill or Till payment actually went through
Show a shop, school, or utility that the payment landed — the receipt carries the transaction code and amount, which is what actually matters for that conversation, not your balance.
4. Keep a clean copy for yourself
Download the receipt as an image even if you're not sending it to anyone — a personal record that's easier to find later than scrolling your SMS history.
5. Install it properly, once
"Add to Home Screen" so it opens instantly like a real app, works offline from day one, and you're not hunting for a browser tab every time you need it.
Level 2 — Everyday: building it into a habit
6. Make it your default before sharing any M-PESA screenshot
The highest-value habit here isn't a feature, it's a reflex: run every confirmation through FARAGHA before it leaves your phone, the same way you'd instinctively cover a PIN pad. Over time this becomes the thing that never lets a balance slip out by accident.
7. Use the masked original as a "hand your phone over" safety net
Once a receipt is generated, the raw message is covered on-screen automatically. That means you can literally hand your unlocked phone to someone standing next to you — a supplier double-checking a receipt, a landlord at your door — without worrying they'll swipe over and see your real inbox or balance.
8. Use Copy as Text when an image doesn't fit the moment
Pasting into an email, a spreadsheet, a written complaint to a company — situations where a picture is the wrong format. The redaction guarantee holds either way.
9. Lean on offline mode deliberately, not just accidentally
Matatu rides, rural visits, market days with patchy signal — generate and hold onto a receipt the moment you have the SMS, send it the moment you're back online, instead of needing to remember later.
10. Use Android's share sheet to skip copy-paste entirely
If you're on Android, sharing the SMS directly from your messages app into FARAGHA is faster than the copy-paste flow — worth deliberately switching to once it's installed, not just defaulting to paste.
Level 3 — Group & Business: what the paid tier is actually for
11. Chama treasurer: tag every contribution as it lands
The flagship group use case. Tag each incoming contribution the moment it arrives instead of reconstructing it all at month-end from memory and a wall of texts.
12. Funeral & harambee committees: transparent, high-volume tracking
The same tagging discipline, applied to a shorter, more urgent, often larger-group collection window — where the ability to show a compiled total immediately matters more than almost anywhere else.
13. School-fee and trip coordinators: seasonal, resettable tracking
Tag contributions to a specific collection event (a trip, a term's fees), pull the report once it closes, and start clean next term.
14. Landlords: tag by tenant or unit
Custom tags aren't limited to the seven defaults — a landlord can tag incoming rent by tenant name or unit number ("HouseA3," "Tenant-Otieno") and use the per-tag report as a running statement for that specific tenant or unit.
15. Small businesses and traders: branded, professional receipts
Your business name on every receipt instead of a generic credit line — the thing that turns "a redacted message" into something that reads as an actual business document to a customer or supplier.
16. Running several simultaneous collections through one group
A chama that's also running a one-off harambee doesn't need a second app or a second group chat — tag contributions to each fund separately, and use "All tags" when you need the combined total and per-tag reports when you need them apart.
17. Formal treasurer handoff, not just personal backup
Backup & Restore isn't only insurance against a lost phone — it's a clean way to formally transfer a complete, intact record to the next elected treasurer, so institutional memory doesn't reset to zero every time leadership changes.
Level 4 — Advanced: repurposing the tools past their obvious use
18. Informal proof-of-income compilation
Tag every incoming payment with a single consistent personal tag (say, "Income") over weeks or months, and the report becomes a dated, itemized record of cash flow — something to show a lender, a landlord vetting a rental application, or anyone else who needs evidence of steady earnings that a bank statement won't capture for gig or informal work.
19. Dispute evidence for group money
When a chama disagreement flares up over who actually paid, a tagged report plus the individual redacted receipts behind it settles the question faster than re-scrolling a group chat's worth of screenshots and half-remembered claims.
20. Personal budgeting by income stream
Tagging isn't reserved for group funds — an individual can invent personal categories ("Freelance," "SideHustle," "Refunds") to see how much is coming from where, using the exact same tag-and-report mechanism built for treasurers, just pointed at a single person's own finances.
21. Lightweight multi-property management
A landlord with several units tags rent by property, then uses "All tags" as a portfolio-wide total collected across everything they own, while individual tag reports break it down property by property — a simple rent ledger with no separate property-management software.
22. Year-over-year comparison for recurring collections
Reusing a distinguishing tag each cycle (SchoolFeesT1-2026 vs. SchoolFeesT1-2027) turns what's normally a one-off record into a longitudinal one — a treasurer can see whether this term's contributions are tracking ahead of or behind the same term last year.
23. A shared verification reference between sender and recipient
The transaction code on a redacted receipt is the same code that's on the sender's original message — meaning a recipient who's unsure can independently check their own M-PESA history against that code, without either party needing to expose anything more than the code itself.
24. Treating periodic backups as a portable financial diary
The backup file is plain, readable JSON, not a locked proprietary format. A methodical user can export monthly and keep a dated archive outside the app entirely — technically capable users can even open a backup file directly to review or lightly process it, since nothing about the format is hidden.
25. Tracking card and subscription charges separately from local spend
FARAGHA recognizes M-PESA card transactions (international and subscription charges) as their own type, distinct from a local Paybill or Till payment — worth knowing if you want a clean record of subscription spend specifically, since most people don't realize this message type is supported at all.
26. Cash reconciliation via tracked withdrawals
"Withdrawn" messages are parsed the same as any other type — useful for a small business owner who needs to show a co-owner or partner exactly when and how much cash was pulled out, without that record doubling as a live balance disclosure.
Level 5 — Expert workflows: combining features on purpose
27. Pilot on Free tier before committing a group to Business tier
A prospective treasurer can run a full month on the free tier first — generating receipts, getting the group used to the discipline of clean proof — before spending anything, using the tier split itself as a deliberate, low-stakes trial rather than committing on day one.
28. Capture now, categorize later
In a live, fast-moving meeting, tag everything into one catch-all tag first so nothing gets missed in the chaos, then go back afterward and re-tag into proper categories once there's time to do it carefully — untagging and re-tagging are cheap, so this two-pass workflow beats trying to categorize perfectly in real time.
29. Use historical reports to train the next treasurer
Beyond just handing over data, months of accumulated reports show a successor the group's actual patterns — who tends to pay early, who pays late, typical amounts — turning the report history into an onboarding tool, not just a ledger.
30. Full lifecycle: pilot → tag → report → hand off → repeat
The complete expert loop: start free to prove the habit works, upgrade once the group's bought in, tag disciplined at every meeting, lean on group reports for every update instead of manual tallying, back up before any leadership transition, and hand off a clean, complete record to the next person — at which point they inherit a running history, not a blank slate.
Quick reference: where to start, by who you are
| You are… | Start here |
|---|---|
| An individual protecting your privacy | Levels 1–2 |
| A chama treasurer | 11, 16, 17, 27, 28 |
| A funeral or harambee organizer | 12, 19, 30 |
| A school-fee or trip coordinator | 13, 22 |
| A landlord | 14, 21 |
| A trader or small business owner | 15, 25, 26 |
| Freelance or gig worker | 18, 20 |
| A retiring or incoming treasurer | 17, 29, 30 |
This guide covers what's genuinely possible with FARAGHA as built — no hypothetical features, nothing on a roadmap. If you find a way to use it that isn't listed here, that's worth telling us about.