Your statement knows what you paid in fees. You probably don’t.

Ask most people what they spend on transport and they can tell you roughly. Ask what they paid to move their own money last year and almost nobody knows — not because they are careless, but because the charges arrive one at a time, in amounts too small to register. Five shillings. Twenty. Fifty-seven. Each one is beneath the threshold where a person bothers to react, and there are hundreds of them.

That is what makes it recoverable. A spending habit is hard to change because it is attached to something you wanted. A transaction charge is attached to nothing — it is the toll for a route you took without knowing there was another one. Once the annual total is in front of you, the decision is usually obvious and takes about a minute.

The statement already records every one of them. It has to; that is what a statement is. The work is purely arithmetic and nobody does it because doing it by hand across a year of M-Pesa activity is genuinely tedious. So we do it: parse the statement, identify every charge line, total them, and group them by what caused them.

This is deliberately not a budgeting exercise. We are not going to tell you that you spend too much on airtime — you know, and being told is not a product. We are telling you a number you did not know, about money that bought you nothing.

A confident wrong number is worse than an admitted gap, so here is the current one. When we total money coming in, we currently count every credit on the statement. That includes Fuliza drawdowns, M-Shwari and KCB M-Pesa loans, and money you moved between your own accounts. None of those are income, and counting them makes the inflow figure look larger than what you actually earned.

We separate those into their own categories, so you can see them. We do not yet subtract them from the headline inflow. Until we do, read that figure as money that arrived, not money you earned. Fixing this properly is the next substantial piece of work, and it matters most for anyone who will eventually show these numbers to a lender.

The second limit is coverage. One month of statement is not a picture of anyone's finances. Three months is thin, six is usable, twelve is solid. Whatever we show you carries the period it was computed from, and if that period is too short to support a conclusion we would rather say so than round the uncertainty away.

The third is the statement itself. We refuse formats we cannot parse reliably rather than guessing at them, because an unparsed statement is safe and a mis-parsed one quietly produces wrong numbers with nothing looking broken. If yours is refused, that is the system working.