No Muster Roll, No Case: What Kenyan Courts Ask For When a Casual Worker Disputes Pay
When a casual worker disputes their hours or pay, Kenyan courts do not ask them to prove it. They ask you. No muster roll, and the gap counts against you.
When a casual worker disputes how many days they worked, or whether they were paid at all, Kenyan courts do not ask the worker to prove it. They ask the employer to show the records. No muster roll, no attendance register, no payment trail, and the gap in your paperwork counts against you, not them.
For most Kenyan SMEs paying casuals in cash with a headcount in someone’s notebook, that gap is normal.
What a Court Actually Asks For
Kenyan courts have said, more than once, that an employer who cannot show a muster roll does not get the benefit of the doubt. In one Employment and Labour Relations Court case, the employer had no muster roll to argue against the worker’s account, so the worker’s account was accepted (Kenya Law, Civil Appeal 6 of 2020; ELRC judgment, 2022). Not having a record is not neutral. It counts as evidence.
Heads up: This is a records problem, not the same as casualisation risk: how long, and how continuously, you engage someone as “casual” in the first place. In Gichuki v Kenya Power (2025), the court said renewing a worker’s short-term contract every three months for eight years of steady, core work broke the constitution, no matter the paperwork (Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr summary). Good records do not fix that kind of problem. This post is about the records.
The Same Gap, With a Tax Bill
The labour court is not the only place this lands. The Tax Appeals Tribunal has decided two cases with the same employer profile and opposite outcomes.
Jilk Construction lost a PAYE assessment of KES 228,569,459. Its casuals had no IDs or KRA PINs and were paid through one trusted team member. For a four-year audit it produced sign-out schedules covering one week.
A schedule prepared by a taxpayer is, without the underlying payment evidence, no more than a reformulated assertion.
Mjengo & General Hardware won, on a muster roll carrying “the name, daily attendance, gross pay other statutory deduction and signatory of the recipient.”
Note what Mjengo had that a headcount does not: daily attendance. Not “five days” — which five.
The Records the Law Expects You to Keep
Beyond the muster roll, keep an attendance register logging clock-in and clock-out times per worker per day, and a casual worker employment card holding each worker’s basic details and work history. Keep them: the full record producible for the preceding 36 months on demand (Employment Act s.74(2)), and written particulars for five years after termination (s.10(6)). Tax runs longer — the Jilk audit below covered four years.
Cash Doesn’t Leave a Trail
A muster roll answers “who worked, and for how long.” It does not answer “were they actually paid.” That second question is where cash quietly becomes a liability: a signature on a sheet, or no signature at all, is easier to dispute than a transaction record showing money actually moving from you to the worker.
What To Do
If You’re Paying Casuals in Cash
Start a muster roll today, even a paper one. Log the worker, the date, the rate, the days worked, and get a signature or thumbprint against each payment.
Time needed: ongoing, and it only protects you from the day you start
If You’re Using a Paper Muster Roll or Excel
You have the record, but check it against all four requirements above. Missing an attendance register or an employment card is still a gap.
Time needed: 2-3 hours to audit what you have
If You’re Using Kazisafi
Upload a timesheet. Kazisafi pays each casual worker weekly or on whatever ad-hoc schedule matches the work, using Bring Your Own Paybill: payments run through your own M-Pesa paybill, not Kazisafi's. The money never touches us on its way to the worker., and rolls every payment into a monthly report. The muster roll carries the M-Pesa receipt against each row, so what the worker did and what reached them sit on one line.
What it does not do yet is the attendance register. Kazisafi holds days worked as a total — five days, not which five — so that fourth box is still yours. We are building it.
Time needed: however long it takes to upload a timesheet
Common Questions
Bring Your Own Paybill. Payments run through your own M-Pesa paybill, not a Kazisafi-held account, so the money goes straight from you to the worker.
No. Payments go straight from your own paybill to the worker. The money never touches Kazisafi on its way there — we never hold it, and we never float it.
Not yet. Weekly and ad-hoc pay work today, matching how most Kenyan casuals are actually paid. Daily is coming soon.
Bring Your Own Paybill: payments run through your own M-Pesa paybill, not Kazisafi's. The money never touches us on its way to the worker. works for casual workers right now. Permanent and fixed-term staff are still paid by exporting payroll to your bank or M-Pesa. Paying everyone this way is coming soon.
Why This Matters
A muster roll is not paperwork for its own sake. It is what stands between you and a dispute you cannot win on the facts alone. Kazisafi builds the record as a side effect of paying people: upload a timesheet, pay from your own paybill, and the hours worked and the payment made sit in the same monthly report, ready if anyone ever asks.