BEFORE HUBTEL

The Accra Metropolitan Assembly is the largest local government body in Ghana. It covers three sub-metros, oversees thousands of properties and businesses, and is legally owed taxes and levies from every one of them. For years, the gap between what was owed and what actually arrived at the accounts office was enormous. 

In 2022, AMA’s best-ever year on record, the Assembly collected GH¢8.5 million. That number tells its own story. 

The collection process had no end-to-end accountability. Bills were printed, sorted, and handed to field agents to distribute door-to-door. Across a city the size of Accra, with the number of agents available, many bills never arrived. Ratepayers who never received a bill rarely went looking for one. The Assembly had no way to know who had been reached and who hadn’t. 

Cash collected in the field passed through several hands before it reached the accounts office. With no digital trail and no real-time tracking, the Assembly had no visibility into what had been collected at any point in the process. By the time money reached accounts, sometimes days later, the original transaction was long out of sight. Agents could alter bill amounts, collect payments and remit nothing, or simply pocket a portion and dare anyone to prove otherwise. Revenue leakage was a structural problem, not an edge case. 

Reconciliation was slow, manual, and always behind. Every payment had to be manually recorded at the accounts office before it appeared anywhere in AMA’s books. Finance teams worked from tallies compiled at the end of the day or end of the month. Decisions were made on old numbers. 

When agents discovered unregistered properties in the field, the process to capture, register, and bill them took days. They had to write down the data, bring it back to the Assembly, enter it inthe system, print a bill, and send an agent back out. A loop that should have taken minutes took a week. 

Leadership knew the scale of the problem. What they needed was the infrastructure to fix it. 

BRINGING CLARITY TO THE PROBLEM 

AMA knew the money was there. They just couldn’t get to it. 

The first thing Hubtel did was make the problem visible. 

Before any collections could improve, AMA needed a clear picture of who owed what, where the money was going, and how much was being lost at each stage of the process. That meant building a system that could capture every transaction, connect every ratepayer to a record, and surface that information to the people who needed it in real time. 

Hubtel worked with AMA to digitise their rate payer database, cleaning up scattered records and uploading them to a central platform. For the first time, the Assembly had a single source of truth: every registered property, every business, every outstanding bill, all in one place. 

Bills that previously required weeks of printing and physical distribution now went out to every rate payer by SMS, the moment they were generated. Leadership could see, instantly, which rate payers had been reached. The guesswork was gone. 

THE CONTROL WE GAVE MANAGEMENT 

With the data in place, Hubtel built a complete, end-to-end revenue collection platform, purposelly built for how a metropolitan assembly operates. 

Real-time visibility for leadership 
The BackOffice staff portal gives AMA’s finance team and leadership a live view of every payment as it comes in. Channel, amount, sub-metro, agent, all visible the moment a transaction completes. What used to take days to compile is now available on demand, any time, filtered however leadership needs it. 

Self-service for rate payers 
A taxpayer portal and USSD service let rate payers settle their bills directly—by mobile money or bank app, from wherever they are. No office visits. No waiting for an agent. Annual bills that previously required weeks of printing and physical distribution now go out to every rate payer by SMS, the moment they’re generated. 

Better tools for agents in the field 
The agent portal shows each inspector their assigned area, the properties within it, and the real-time payment status of every rate payer — before they leave the office. Google Maps integration routes them directly to specific properties. Payments collected in the field go through the platform immediately, creating a complete, timestamped record of every transaction. 

An incentive structure that made collections move 
Hubtel built a commission engine into the agent portal: agents earn 10% on every collection under GH¢5,000, paid instantly to their agent wallet. The result: agents had a direct financial incentive to reach rate payers they might previously have skipped. Collections increased noticeably once the structure launched. 

Instant certificates, eliminating forgery 
When a business completes payment, the platform generates their Business Operating Permit automatically, with a QR code that any agent or staff member can scan to verify on the spot. Previously, certificates were produced manually and were vulnerable to forgery. Now the process is instant, and every certificate has a permanent digital record behind it. 

PURSUING GROWTH 

From GH¢8.5 million to GH¢25.5 million in a year 

Hubtel came on board mid-2024. In that half-year alone, with the platform still rolling out and agents still adjusting, the Assembly collected GH¢6.2 million. In 2025, the first full year, collections hit GH¢25.5 million. More than three times the record AMA had held for years. 

By April 2026, the Assembly had already brought in GH¢12 million, on track to exceed 2025 with months still to go. 

Reconciliation that previously took days now happens in real time. Leadership works from live data, not monthly summaries. Field agents know exactly where to go and have a reason to follow through. And rate payers across Accra can settle their bills without ever setting foot in a government office. AMA was already owed the money. Hubtel built the infrastructure to collect it. 

Ready to see what Hubtel can do for your business?  Find out here.