Some customers pay instantly. Others pay after reminders. Too many pay long after you have covered the cost of delivery. That gap between earned revenue and received cash is where small businesses suffocate.

This is not a side story. MSMEs account for the overwhelming share of Nigerian businesses and a very large share of employment and GDP.

When late payments lock up working capital, owners borrow to meet payroll, push back inventory purchases, and miss opportunities because cash is trapped in limbo.

For a school proprietor that might mean delaying teacher salaries or postponing repairs. For a clinic it might mean stretching medicine stock. For a co-op it slows the lending cycle that members depend on.

The national payments landscape shows a different picture. Nigerians have embraced digital rails for everyday value exchange.

Instant transfers and other e-payment instruments now carry large volumes each year. Card acceptance is wider, bank apps are better, and many merchants already take digital payments. Willingness and tools exist.

The problem for recurring obligations is not whether customers can pay. The problem is whether they do so on time and without constant human follow up.

Recurring payments often behave like yesterday. An invoice goes out, a WhatsApp reminder follows, then a second and a third. Parents promise to transfer fees next week.

Members say they will renew dues when they get paid. Owners carry the administrative load and the emotional burden.

It is fragile by design because memory fails and monthly liquidity swings. Teams spend hours babysitting receivables instead of serving customers.

Nigeria already has the plumbing to make recurring payments act differently. Under the Central Bank framework and NIBSS infrastructure, a customer can give consent for a defined amount and a defined schedule.

With a direct debit mandate in place, the system moves funds on due dates and records a clear trail.

The rules require consent, auditability, reminders, and recourse. The rails are not new. They are simply under-used by many consumer-facing SMEs.

Move fee collection or dues from chase to consent and the picture changes. Parents approve once, then pay in predictable instalments. Co-op members stay current without monthly nudges.

Businesses gain a rhythm that matches payroll and supplier cycles. Reminders do not disappear, they shift to helpful notifications before each debit.

Administration shrinks. Relationships improve because owners stop playing debt collector and return to the role customers value them for.

If the rails exist, why is adoption uneven? Three reasons recur in field conversations. First, onboarding can feel complex if mandate screens are clunky or unfamiliar. Second, trust requires transparency.

People want clear pre-debit alerts and easy pause or cancel options. Third, operators need tools that plug into everyday workflows.

Reconciliation should be automatic. Notifications should be instant. Staff should not need a separate spreadsheet to keep up.

That is the gap we have focused on at OnePipe. We built PaywithAccount to help schools and similar SMEs set up those consents cleanly and collect on schedule through Nigeria’s regulated direct debit system.

The idea is simple. Customers grant permission in plain language. On due dates, funds move from bank accounts to the business account through the trusted rails many Nigerians already use for transfers.

For the operator, the benefits are practical. Cash becomes predictable. Admin becomes lighter. Reconciliation becomes faster. For the customer, control and clarity remain in place.

None of this suggests that late payments will vanish overnight. It does suggest that a country which has already shifted a huge share of commerce to digital can move a bigger share of recurring obligations from manual to mandated.

The change starts with design. Pick a pilot segment such as returning families who already pay in parts. Offer instalments with clear reminders and a visible stop switch.

Measure days sales outstanding before and after one term. Share results with parents and stakeholders. Scale steadily.

There is also a role for associations and ecosystem players. School owner groups and co-ops can issue model templates that standardise consent language.

Banks and processors can keep smoothing mandate user experience and dispute handling. Media can highlight practices that keep children in class and keep small businesses solvent.

Policymakers can amplify the message that on time payment is not only a private matter. It protects jobs, keeps services stable, and reduces friction across the local economy.

Predictable revenue is oxygen. When it flows on time, owners plan. When owners plan, teams perform. When teams perform, communities thrive. That is a change worth making this term.

The shutdown comes after the resignation of CEO and founder Ebun Okubanjo, as well as the dismissal of the company’s engineering team over unpaid salaries.

In an email to customers, Bento’s board announced the decision, advising clients not to fund their payroll accounts during this period. “We will proceed to temporarily shut down operations to bring stability back to the company,” the board stated. “We are confident of the restoration of normalcy soon.”

The issue began when Bento’s engineers, who had not received their January salaries, stopped working in protest. Okubanjo, who resigned on 30 January, informed employees the next day that their salaries would be “strategically delayed” to prioritise client payroll processing.

In response, employees collectively decided to stop operations until they were paid. Instead of resolving the issue, the company dismissed the entire 10-person tech team, effectively paralysing its payroll processing system.

Several clients took to social media to complain about delays in salary disbursement, with some confirming that their employees had not been paid in the first week of February. 

Bento Africa, which previously relied on automated salary disbursement, has been manually processing payments since early 2024 due to payment processor issues and account funding discrepancies.

Nonetheless, the company later assured customers that outstanding salaries had been paid, and some employees had been reinstated to restore core functionality. 

However, Bento acknowledged that certain payroll transactions were unresolved. It pledged to refund affected clients by the close of business on Tuesday.

Beyond has been accused of failing to remit tax and pension payments and allegedly forging tax receipts for clients in Lagos State. These accusations, which surfaced shortly before Okubanjo’s resignation, have distorted trust in the company’s financial management and compliance with regulatory requirements.

Although Okubanjo stepped down, he continued communicating with employees, attempting to justify the delayed salaries. “It’s January, and everyone is going through it financially,” an affected ex-employee stated in a message. “Even amidst all the chaos, we’re still here working without knowing where the company is headed. The team has collectively agreed to halt all operations until we get paid.”

Employees rejected an offer from Okubanjo to split withheld salaries among those willing to continue working. Following their refusal, he deactivated their work emails and treated their protest as resignations.

Some of Bento’s former staff members are worried about the impact of the controversy on their careers. “I even took the company off my LinkedIn for a while,” one ex-employee admitted to TechCabal.

The application security SaaS company, Indusface, was intrigued to delve into this further and uncover the most common data that professionals are sharing with AI and the implications this can have on individuals and businesses.

Some of the findings:

1. Work-related files and documents: 

One of the most common categories of information shared with AI is work-related files and documents.

Over 80% of professionals in Fortune 500 enterprises use AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to assist with tasks such as analysing numbers, refining emails, reports, and presentations.

However, 11% of data employees paste into ChatGPT is strictly confidential, such as internal business strategies, without fully understanding how the platform processes this data. It is therefore recommended to remove sensitive data when inputting search commands into AI tools.

2. Personal details:

Personal details such as names, addresses and contact information are often being shared with AI tools daily. Shockingly, 30% of professionals believe that protecting their personal data isn’t worth the effort indicating a growing sense of helplessness and lack of training.

Access to cybersecurity training has increased for the first time in four years, with 1 in 3 (33%) participants using it and 11% having access but not utilizing it.

For businesses to remain safe from cyber security threats, it is important to carry out cybersecurity training for staff, upskilling on the safe use of AI.

3. Client or employee information:

Client information including data that may fall under regulatory or confidentiality requirements is often being shared with AI by professionals.

For business owners or managers using AI for employee information, it is important to be wary of sharing bank account details, payroll, addresses, or even performance reviews as this can violate contract policy and lead to organisation vulnerability due to any potential legal actions if sensitive employee data is leaked.

4. Financial information:

Large language models (LLMs) are often used and are crucial AI models for many generative AI applications, such as virtual assistants and conversational AI chatbots. This can often be used via OpenAI models, Google Cloud AI, and many more.

However, the data that helps train LLMs is usually sourced by web crawlers scraping and collecting information from websites.

This data is often obtained without users’ consent and might contain personally identifiable information (PII).

Other AI systems that deliver tailored customer experiences might collect personal data, too. It is recommended to ensure that the devices used when interacting with LLMs are secure, with full antivirus protection to safeguard information before it is shared, especially when dealing with sensitive business financial information.

5. Passwords and access credentials: 

AI models are designed to provide insights, but not safely secure passwords, and could result in unintended exposure, especially if the platform does not have strict privacy and security measures.

Avoid reusing passwords that may have been used across multiple sites as this could lead to a breach on multiple accounts.

The importance of using strong passwords with multiple symbols and numbers has never been more important, in addition to activating two-factor identification to secure accounts and mitigate the risk of cyberattacks.

6. Company codebases and intellectual property (IP):

Developers and employees increasingly turn to AI for coding assistance, however sharing company codebases can pose a major security risk as it is a business’s core intellectual property.

If proprietary source code is pasted into AI platforms, it may be stored, processed, or even used to train future AI models, potentially exposing trade secrets to external entities.

Businesses should therefore implement strict AI usage policies to ensure sensitive code remains protected and never shared externally.

Additionally, using self-hosted AI models or secure, company-approved AI tools can help mitigate the risks of leaking intellectual property.

Paying employees sounds straightforward, but it is not unusual for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to make mistakes in managing their payroll.

These errors can have serious consequences, ranging from damaging employee morale to fraud losses, and tax penalties for late or incorrect tax payments and submissions.

Tax regulations are constantly changing, the rules are complex and technical, and there is a lot of data to process and manage. As such, it is easy for things to go wrong when a business doesn’t have robust processes and systems in place.

Here are some of the biggest mistakes we see SMBs make in processing their payrolls.

1. Overpaying or underpaying employees by mistake

Paying employees, the incorrect amount of remuneration can cause serious headaches for your business. Underpaying employees can affect staff morale and cause people distress, while overpaying is a financial risk to the business. Even small discrepancies can turn monthly reconciliations and annual audits into a headache.

Some reasons that these errors can creep in include:

• Using the incorrect tax codes;
• Failing to accurately track an employee’s overtime, commissions, bonuses, unpaid leave or leave pay;
• Errors in processing expense claims, travel allowances and other disbursements; and
• Mistakes in data capture.

Solution: Businesses should consider implementing a robust payroll system that automates most of these processes.

This system should be able to accurately calculate pay based on various factors such as hours worked, commissions, bonuses and leave. It should also correctly apply tax codes and handle expense claims and allowances.

2. Not planning for public holidays

Public holidays can throw a spanner in the works in numerous ways. Failing to account for public holidays may result in not paying employees the correct hourly wages for working on these days.

Another potential issue is that employees might only be paid the next working day if the normal day of the payroll run falls on a public holiday.

Solution: SMBs HR and payroll leaders should thus mark off public holidays on their calendars to ensure that employees are paid by the day of the month they usually get their money.

3. Picking the incorrect payroll schedule

Since labour is one of the biggest expenses for the average SMB, they will want to ensure they have cash in the bank when doing the payroll run.

Solution: It is wise to align weekly, fortnightly, or monthly wage and salary payments with cash flows into the business to avoid relying on the overdraft facility.

4. Failing to process the payroll on time

Delayed payroll processing can lead to disgruntled employees and potential legal consequences.

Solution: Establishing a strict payroll processing timeline, complete with reminders and backup plans, will help business owners ensure timely and accurate payments.

It is also vital to meet the deadlines for submitting EMP501 interim and annual reconciliations to SARS to avoid fines and penalties.

5. Incorrect gross and net calculations

Incorrectly calculating gross and net remuneration can result in discrepancies in tax deductions. This can lead to problems with SARS.

Solution: Regularly reviewing and reconciling payroll data helps ensure compliance with tax regulations.

6. Not maintaining payroll records

According to South Africa’s Basic Conditions of Employment Act, companies must keep the following records for at least five years: employment contracts, time sheets, pay slips, SARs and UIF submissions. SARS also requires businesses to keep financial records for a minimum of five years.

Solution: SMBs should keep accurate payroll records for tax reporting, audits, and resolving disputes.

7. Not staying up to date with payroll legislation and regulations

South Africa’s tax laws and regulations are in constant flux, with the finance minister and Treasury announcing new tax rules and tables in the budget each February. SMBs must ensure they comply with the latest labour laws and tax regulations to stay on the right side of SARS and the Department of Labour.

Solution: Attending payroll seminars, watching webinars, and attending industry conferences can help enhance your knowledge and keep you up to speed with the latest changes. The SARS website is another valuable resource that can help people stay abreast.

8. Incorrectly identifying employees or contractors

Under South Africa’s tax and labour laws, independent contractors are treated differently from employees.

True independent employees who invoice the business services rendered or goods supplied should not be added to the payroll.

There are several complex tests of whether a worker is an employee or a contractor, but South Africa’s laws will regard a colleague as an employee if:

• They provide their services at the premises of the person by whom they are paid, and
• They are subject to the control or supervision of a company representative regarding how they perform their duties.

The same employee may be regarded as an employee for tax purposes but not under labour law. If a contractor is an employee for PAYE purposes and is paid remuneration, the company will need to withhold PAYE and contribute to the Skills Development Levy, but not UIF.

If SARS determines that an SMB should have withheld these taxes for a worker, it will claim the money from the employer.

Automation can eliminate most of these errors

Across all the above errors listed, the easiest way for an SMB to reduce and avoid these errors is to put an automated payroll solution in place.

The software will accurately calculate employees’ salaries and deductions, compile tax submissions, and record employee information and transactional data in a single place.

A good payroll solution will also be automatically updated with the latest laws and regulations.

Today, SMBs can find affordable cloud-based payroll solutions that are 100% compliant with South African tax legislation and regulations.

Not only does automating help SMB owners get the basics of payroll right with minimal effort, but it also frees them from paperwork and gives them more time to spend on growing the business.

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