Glossary
The words Ghana saves with.
Susu, passbooks, PAR, trial balances — the vocabulary of the platform, defined the way we use it.
Terms
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.
Leaderboard
- The ranked list of members by loyalty points.
Loyalty points
- Points members earn for paying on time, which build their loyalty tier and their discount.
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.
Month-end review
- Stating what each account should read at month end and posting only the difference, so the books reconcile.
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.
SusuPal
- SusuPaa's read-only AI assistant. It answers questions about your account from your own ledger, members, loans and reports — never inventing a figure — and generates downloadable reports.
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.