Glossary
The words this business runs on, defined plainly.
Susu, savings and lending carry their own vocabulary, and this site uses it throughout. Every term below is defined the same way the rest of the site talks — concrete, bounded, no hype.
All terms
23 words worth knowing.
Agent cash reconciliation
End of day, what a collector banks is checked against what the system says they collected. The gap is the finding.
Arrears
Loans behind on repayment.
₵ / cedi
Ghana's currency. Amounts across this site are real-scale, not decorative.
Chart of accounts
The named list of accounts the ledger posts into. Configurable per institution.
Cooperative / welfare fund
A member-owned organisation — sometimes occupational, sometimes church or community based — that runs susu, savings and sometimes small lending for its members. Committees, executives and boards, elected officers who rotate, and a duty to report to the membership.
Double-entry ledger
Every movement of money recorded twice, as a matching debit and credit, so the books can be proved to balance.
Ghana Card
Ghana's national identity card. Verifying it is how a member's identity is established.
Journal drill-down
Being able to click a figure in a report and see the underlying postings.
Loyalty tiers
Bronze through Diamond, earned on payment reliability rather than volume, with points and tier discounts.
Maker-checker / dual control
A second person must approve a sensitive action before it executes.
Microfinance institution (MFI)
A licensed lender, regulated by the Bank of Ghana. Savings-and-loans companies sit in the same space. They employ field agents, run branches, keep a loan book, and answer to a regulator and a board.
MoMo / mobile money
Payment from a phone wallet. The three networks named across this site are MTN, Telecel and AirtelTigo — a primary payment rail, not a convenience.
Offline-first
Collections must be recordable with no signal at all, queued on the device, and synced when coverage returns. This is not a resilience feature bolted on — it is a condition of the job.
PAR (portfolio at risk)
The share of the loan book that is overdue, split by how long overdue. The headline health number for a lender.
Passbook
The member's own copy of their savings record. Has cycles, fee modes, and pages that fill up.
Provisioning
Setting money aside against loans expected to go bad, by age bucket.
ROSCA
A rotating savings and credit association — the general term for what susu is in West Africa. A group contributes a fixed amount on a fixed schedule and the whole pot goes to one member each cycle, in turn.
Settlement
Money arriving from a payment provider being matched to the transactions it pays for.
Slot
A member's turn to take the pot in a susu cycle. Everyone pays in the same amount and everyone takes out the same amount; only the timing differs.
Susu
A rotating savings scheme, the West African form of what is called a ROSCA elsewhere. A group of people contribute a fixed amount on a fixed schedule — often daily, often small. Each cycle, the whole pot goes to one member, in turn. Susu is how a great many Ghanaians save, and it predates the software by generations.
Susu collector
A person, usually working alone, who walks or rides a daily round collecting small cash contributions from market traders, shop owners and households, recording each payment in a paper notebook while the member holds a paper passbook as their own copy. The collector is the system: the record, the cash, the relationship and the risk are all carried by one person.
Trial balance
The report that proves a ledger balances: total debits equal total credits, or something is wrong.
White-label
The institution's own brand and domain on the software, so members see their organisation, not SusuPaa.
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