The ROSCA in your books
Almost every business in Egypt is in a ROSCA — the company itself, or the staff running one between them with the company keeping the book. And the commonest mistake in the accounts is recording the instalment as an expense and the pot as income. The result: the month you paid two instalments looks like a bad month, and the month your turn came looks like a great one — while you neither earned nor lost anything. The money went out and came back. And if you have partners, this quietly moves money between you: the ROSCA month shows less profit so their share shrinks, the payout month shows more so it grows — on money that was never profit at all.
The idea in a minute
If you have paid in more than you have taken out, the ROSCA owes you — that is money the company is owed. If your turn came early, you still owe the rest — that is a liability. Either way the figure has nothing to do with profit: it neither raises it nor lowers it.
How it works
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1. The ROSCA gets an account, not an expense line
Your accountant opens one account for this ROSCA in the chart of accounts — an asset while you are paying in and have not yet taken your turn, or a liability once you have taken the pot and still owe instalments. That account lives as long as the ROSCA does and collects every movement on it. A new ROSCA gets a new account, each with its own balance.
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2. The instalment: a «Pay on account» voucher
Every instalment you pay is recorded with a «Pay on account» voucher: the money leaves the drawer or the bank and lands on the ROSCA's account. It never touches expenses — so the month keeps its real profit, while the cash goes down exactly as much as it actually did.
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3. Your turn: a «Receive on account» voucher
When your turn comes and you take the pot, you record it with a «Receive on account» voucher: the money enters the treasury and comes off the ROSCA's account. It is not counted as income and never enters your sales — so the month does not show an imaginary windfall.
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4. You do not have to hunt for the account
The voucher offers ready-made choices — ROSCA instalment, ROSCA pot, loan instalment, loan received, deposit paid, deposit refunded — and the system searches the chart of accounts for the account by name. If it finds more than one it shows them for you to pick; if it finds none it tells you to create the account first. So the cashier or treasurer does not need to know the chart of accounts.
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5. The system stops you booking it to the wrong account
These two vouchers accept only an asset or a liability account. Pick a treasury or bank account, a customer, supplier, partner or employee account, or inventory, tax, fixed assets or payroll payable — and it refuses, naming the right voucher to use instead. The check runs as you record it and again at confirmation, so a voucher left waiting for approval cannot slip through wrong later.
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6. The balance comes from the ROSCA's own statement
The ROSCA account's statement shows every instalment you paid and every payout you took with its date, and the running balance after each. So “how much have I put in and how much is left?” becomes a number you read, rather than a sum you do on paper from the instalment book.
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7. The same two vouchers for loans and deposits
Any money that goes out and comes back is recorded the same way: a loan from a bank or a person, a rent deposit or an electricity or gas meter deposit, a loan to someone outside the company. And when the instalment carries interest, on the web you add it as a second row on an expense account in the same voucher — so the principal comes off the liability and the interest goes to expenses, each in its right place. On the mobile app the interest is recorded as a separate «Other expense» voucher.
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8. A ROSCA already running before you started on Zemam
If the ROSCA has been running since before you came onto Zemam, you do not need to enter every past instalment one by one. Your accountant posts an opening entry for the net position — what you have taken minus what you have paid — and from then on every new movement is recorded with the two vouchers normally.
In short
The instalment is not an expense and the pot is not income — your profit stays honest month by month.
No partner's profit share is affected by the ROSCA at all.
The ROSCA's balance — what you are owed and what you still owe — is a number you read off the statement at any time.
The same two vouchers work for loans, rent and meter deposits, and loans to an outside party.
Why this matters
The ROSCA month is no longer a loss-making month
If the instalments are booked as expenses, a month in which you paid two or three looks weak — and you compare month to month and make decisions on a wrong number. By the same logic the payout month looks strong when you did not earn an extra pound.
Partners do not end up arguing
Profit distribution is calculated on profit. So when a ROSCA leaks into profit, every partner's share moves on money that was never profit — and that is one of the quickest ways to start an argument between partners, because each of them is looking at a number and doing the sums correctly. These two vouchers settle it at the root: the ROSCA has no effect on profit.
Without manual journal entries
A manual journal entry is not allowed to touch a treasury account — and rightly so, because cash should only move on documents. Before these two vouchers there was no way to get money from the drawer onto the ROSCA's account: the expense voucher accepts only expense accounts and the income voucher only revenue ones. So the accountant had to work around it. Now there is a voucher that fits.
The limits, plainly
Zemam does not run the ROSCA for you: there is no instalment schedule for it, no reminder for the next instalment, and no tracking of whose turn it is this month. What it does is record the money in the right place and keep your balance. The schedule and the turns stay between you and the group — what changes is that the numbers in your books are now right.
Is your ROSCA kept in a little notebook?
Talk to us and we'll show you how the instalment and the payout are recorded in a minute, without disturbing your profit or your partners' shares.