Koonto
Last updated 24 September 2026
Koonto is a cashbook. It keeps the record of money in and money out for your shop, so you can stop keeping it in a paper notebook or in your head.
Everything below is a plain description of what the app actually does with what you type into it. If a sentence here and the app disagree, the app is wrong and we will fix it.
MAAMUL TECH COMPANY LIMITED
Ofoq Building, Muhoho Avenue
Nairobi, Kenya
Write to us at support@maamul.com about anything on this page.
Your email address. If you sign in with Apple and choose to hide your email, we only ever see the private forwarding address Apple gives us, never your real one.
The things you enter: your businesses and books, and every entry in them — amount, currency, date, note, category, and which pocket the money moved through. From these Koonto also builds your accounts and its double-entry ledger.
And your shop's own details, for the ones you choose to fill in: its name, address, phone number, email, trade and size. These sit on the Settings screen, they are used to head your statements and receipts, and every one of them can be left empty.
Names, phone numbers and email addresses of your customers and suppliers, and what each one owes or is owed.
You can type these in, or bring them across from your phone's address book. Only the people you tick come across. Koonto reads your address book to show you the list and takes nothing else from it, and it can never write to it or change it — that permission is switched off in the app itself.
Photos of receipts and invoices you attach to an entry. Payment messages — such as an M-Pesa confirmation — that you paste in or forward to the Koonto Telegram bot.
Which plan you are on, whether it is active, and when the period ends.
Koonto does not take real payments yet. The upgrade screen asks for a card number, or an M-Pesa phone number, so your plan can be switched on. Your full card number never leaves your phone. Only the last four digits are sent, and they are used to confirm the change and then thrown away — they are not written into any record. The M-Pesa number is treated the same way.
When a real payment service is connected we will update this page before it goes live, not after.
On servers in Paris, France, run by Supabase. Everything travels there encrypted, and each account can only read its own rows — enforced by the database itself, not just by the app.
Your phone also keeps a copy so Koonto works when the network does not. That copy lives inside the app's own private storage and goes when you delete the app.
Only these, only for the job named, and none of them for advertising:
| Who | What they see | When |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Your account and all your records — they host the database | Always |
| Google, through OpenRouter | The receipt photo itself, to read the numbers off it | Only when you scan a receipt |
| Sentry | Crash reports: what broke and where in the code | Only when the app crashes |
| Telegram | The messages you send their bot | Only if you use the Telegram bot |
About scanning a receipt. When you photograph a receipt and ask Koonto to read it, that image is sent to a Google Gemini model so the total, the date and the shop name can be pulled out and offered to you. Nothing is saved to your book until you accept it.
Koonto asks for that reading on terms that forbid keeping the picture: every request carries an instruction to use only services that do not store the image and do not train on it. If no such service is available the reading simply fails and you type the total in yourself. We would rather the feature stop working than the promise stop being true.
If you would rather no photo ever left the country, type the entry in by hand. Everything Koonto does works without scanning.
Crash reports carry no personal information and not even your IP address — that setting is deliberately switched off. A crash report tells us a line of code failed; it does not tell us who you are.
| Permission | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Camera | Photographing a receipt |
| Photos | Choosing a receipt you already took |
| Contacts (read only) | Bringing your customers and suppliers in without typing them |
Every one of these is optional, asked for at the moment it is needed, and refusing it leaves the rest of Koonto working normally.
Your records stay for as long as your account exists, because a cashbook you cannot look back through is not a cashbook. Delete a business inside the app and everything in it — books, entries, contacts, receipts — goes with it.
Ask us to close your account and we delete everything within 30 days. Anonymous crash reports are kept for 90 days by Sentry and then dropped.
Email support@maamul.com and we will answer within 30 days.
Koonto is for running a business and is not meant for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly keep records about children.
We will change the date at the top, and if the change matters we will tell you inside the app rather than hope you come back and re-read this.