Paying one person is easy. Paying 1,248 people from a grant, on time, to the right accounts, with every naira accounted for when the funder asks, is a different job. Most of the risk is not in the transfer itself. It is in the spreadsheet before it and the reconciliation after it.
This guide walks through how a programme disbursement runs in iPay, from an empty programme to a closed batch, and what is on record at each step.
Before you start
You will need:
- The programme details: its name, the grant or funding source it is paid from, and the activities or cohorts it covers.
- Your beneficiary list: names, bank details and amounts for everyone being paid in this batch.
- Your approvers: the people who must sign off before any money leaves, in the order they sign.
- A funded iPay wallet to pay the batch from.
Step 1: Set up the programme
Start by creating the programme and recording the grant and funding source it draws on. Then split it into activities, for example one per cohort, state or project phase.
This structure is what makes the reporting work later. When a funder asks “how much went to the Kano cohort, and from which grant?”, the answer is already organised that way instead of being rebuilt from bank statements.
Step 2: Upload the beneficiary list
Fill in iPay’s beneficiary template and upload it. Every row is checked as it lands. iPay flags:
- Duplicates: the same beneficiary appearing twice in the batch.
- Invalid details: account details that will not work.
You fix the flagged rows and re-upload only the corrections, not the whole file. A 1,253-row upload with five problem rows becomes a clean batch of 1,248 without anyone re-checking the other 1,248 by hand.
The cheapest failed transfer is the one you catch before the batch is approved.
Step 3: Send the batch for approval
The batch now moves through the approval stages you set, in order. A typical chain might be:
| Stage | Who | What they check |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Programme officer | The right people, cohort and amounts |
| 2 | Finance | Funding source and wallet balance |
| 3 | Director | Final sign-off |
Nothing is paid until the last stage signs off. Each approval is recorded with the approver’s name and the time, so the batch carries its own evidence of who said yes.
Step 4: Authorise and disburse
After the final approval, the batch is authorised with a one-time code (OTP) and paid out from your iPay wallet. The OTP adds a deliberate last step: approving a batch and releasing the money are separate actions.
As transfers complete, each beneficiary’s status updates, so you can watch the batch progress instead of waiting for a bank file.
Step 5: Handle the exceptions
At this scale, some transfers will fail. Accounts close, banks time out. iPay lists every exception with its reason:
- Retry failed transfers from the same screen once the cause is fixed.
- Reversals are tracked back to the beneficiary they belong to.
- Every retry and reversal is added to the batch’s history.
The goal is a batch that closes cleanly: every beneficiary either paid, or explained.
Step 6: Close and report
When the batch is done, you have a single record of the whole disbursement: the upload and its corrections, every approval, the OTP authorisation, each transfer, and every retry and reversal. That audit trail can be exported for your funder or auditor.
Because payouts are organised by programme and activity, the monthly report shows what went out, by programme, without a separate reconciliation exercise.
A checklist for your next disbursement
- Programme created, with its grant and funding source recorded.
- Activities or cohorts set up.
- Beneficiary template filled in and uploaded.
- Duplicates and invalid details fixed, and corrections re-uploaded.
- Approval stages confirmed, in order.
- Wallet funded for the batch total.
- Batch approved at every stage, then authorised with an OTP.
- Exceptions retried or explained.
- Audit trail exported for the file.
See it with your own programme
Every programme is structured differently. Book a 30-minute demo and we will walk through a disbursement shaped like yours, or read more about bulk payouts in iPay.
