Fastest way to Renew Business Permit

Just ahead of the 31^st March deadline to renew your business permit in Nairobi, knowing well how we all love that last minute rush, here is a post that will give you a step by step procedure you can use to renew your small business permit in just a couple of minutes!

This is by far the FASTEST way to do it and the most CONVENIENT!

Check list

• Money on your mobile money account/ bank account if doing online banking
• Some extra money for service charge
• Your small business ID – you can get this from your past business permits
• Time: 10 minutes

Procedure

Sign up on the Nairobi county self service portal using your personal details, ie, Name, Email, Phone number, National ID, PIN/ password (you will use this PIN in a number of places while interacting with the system so choose something secure but easy for you to remember).

After signing up, proceed to log in and the first thing you will see will be the Nairobi city county self service portal homepage.

There are a lot of things on the homepage but for now ignore everything and only concentrate on the “SBP” – Small Business Permit section. To proceed, click the “Renew” link where you will end up on the check status page.

The beauty of this page is that you can be able to check your company status and know how much you are meant to pay before you proceed, especially if you have forgotten what you had paid in the previous years.

NB: It is on this page where you can as well check you business permit status for the previous years. You can even get access to them and re-print if need be.

Proceed to fill out your “Business ID”, which you can get access to from your previous business permits (it’s the number on the top right hand corner of the permit under “BID”).

Enter the “Business ID” and select the year you intend to renew then click “Check status”.

The system will give you back your business details together with how much you are meant to pay. This amount could include the annual fee plus penalties you might have accrued over the years or from late payments, ie, past the payment deadline.

Confirm that your business details look fine and that you have not been unjustly penalized. If you are a first time user then chances are your “e-wallet” doesn’t have any money and you now need to top it up thus the “You Do Not Have Enough Funds to Proceed with Payment. Your Wallet balance is Ksh.0.00” message.

To top-up your account proceed to click the “Top up Now” button which will take you to the “Nairobi County e-wallet” page.

The “e-wallet” enables you to top-up your account, so proceed to fill out your phone number, PIN (the same as the one you used to log-in) and the amount you want to top up (the amount should be at least the amount you had been shown before. If you will be making any more payments later you can increase the amount to read the total of all your transactions).

Click the “submit” button to view the payment options available.

We used Mpesa to make our payment but most likely the rest work more or less in the same way.

FYI: Our bill was 10,000Kes (as seen on some of the screenshots) making the service charge 110Kes. It took us a couple of top-ups on our Mpesa line before we finally gave up and contacted Jambopay directly to tell us what we needed up and above the 10k in order to make the payment.

NB: Topping up at a Jambopay agent is free of charge but using mobile money or a partner bank will cost you.

Proceed to click the option you intend to use and follow the instructions from there as they are somewhat straightforward.

The trick to remember at this point is that the system uses sessions. As much as the payment instructions remain the same, the “Account Number” changes every time you repeat this process. And if you take too long to make the payment as well, the session will expire and you might end up paying to the wrong “Account Number”…which is exactly what I did!

Sidebar: If this happens to you, don’t panic. The system is powered by Jambopay and you can get in touch with their customer care.

Explain the mistake you did and the contact person will ask you for the phone number that you used to make the payment with. They will then manually update your “e-wallet” balance to read the amount you had deposited as opposed to a 0 balance which is what you will see if you check the “e-wallet” at this point.

If you are really pro and you don’t mess it up like I did, the system should be able to pick up your payment and when it does, you will receive a text from “NRB COUNTY” confirming your payment.

After the confirmation you should proceed to click the “Finish” button. The system should revert you back to your business details page where the initial “Top up Now” button has been replaced with a new one “Proceed to complete payment”, indicating that your e-wallet now has enough funds to make this payment.

Click the “Proceed to complete payment” button if you are ready to make this payment. This will lead you to a confirmation page having your company name, amount and transaction ID – same as the transaction ID/ “Receipt Number” on the text message you received.

When happy with the details, type out your PIN (again, same as the log-in one) and click “Submit details” If everything was okay, the payment will be completed and the system will notify you.

Click the “Print Permit” button to download your new small business permit so that you can print and display it at your business premises as required by law…then click the “Print Receipt” button to download your payment receipt as, well, your books of accounts need to be updated as well 🙂

Images source: Nairobi County Council Self Service Portal