P9A cards for a Kenyan client's employees
How a payroll bureau produces P9A cards for a Kenyan client's employees from approved runs, gets them to staff, and checks them against the year's P10s.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in Kenya
Every January the same messages arrive at a Kenyan payroll bureau. A client's driver needs his P9A to file his return. A former employee who left in August wants hers for a loan application. The client's HR officer asks whether the cards can simply be "put somewhere staff can download them".
The card itself is not difficult to produce. What takes care is producing it from the right figures, getting it to people who have no access to the payroll system, and being able to show that the year's cards agree with what was declared to KRA month by month. This article covers all three for a bureau running Kenyan clients on Achekam.
What the P9A is for
The P9A is the employer's annual record of an employee's pay and tax for the year. It sets out, month by month, what the employee earned, the deductions allowed against that pay, the tax charged, the reliefs given and the PAYE deducted. Because the individual tax year in Kenya is the calendar year, a card covers January to December.
Employees use it to complete their own annual return. At the time of writing, Kenyan individual returns are due by 30 June, moving to 30 April from 1 January 2027, first for the 2026 year of income. In other words, the cards for 2026 are needed two months earlier than staff may be used to, and a bureau that sends them late pushes its clients' employees towards a penalty they did nothing to earn. KRA's guide to filing the annual income tax return on iTax walks employees, people with business income and nil filers through the return, with video walkthroughs; it is worth sending to staff with their cards.
Produced from approved runs only
For a Kenyan employer, Achekam's payroll computes PAYE, the Affordable Housing Levy, NSSF, SHIF and the NITA levy, and from approved runs it prepares the P10, SHIF, NSSF and NITA schedules and a P9A per employee for the year.
The words "approved runs" carry weight. A run that is still being prepared does not feed the card, and an approved run is never recalculated. That has two consequences for a bureau:
- A December run left unapproved leaves December off the card. Approve the last run of the year before producing cards, or the totals will be short by a month.
- A wrong month cannot be quietly recalculated. There is no separate correction run: a fix goes in as a variable input on a later regular run. The card then shows the original month as approved and the correction in the month it was made, which is also how the P10s will have declared it.
Before any of this, the firm must have confirmed its own copy of the 2026 Kenyan tax table. A run cannot use an unconfirmed table, so a bureau that has run Kenyan payroll all year has already done this; one taking on a client mid-year should check.
Not available in self-service
Achekam has a self-service area where a staff member whose login is linked to their payroll record can download their own payslips, apply for leave and submit claims or detail changes. It shows only South African IRP5 and IT3(a) tax certificates. A Kenyan employee's P9A is available only on the payroll side.
So the HR officer's request, a place where staff download their own cards, cannot be met inside Achekam today. The bureau, or the client's payroll administrator, downloads each card and gets it to the employee.
Getting the cards to employees
Treat the P9A as confidential: it shows an individual's full pay and tax for a year. A sensible routine:
- Download each card from the payroll side once December is approved.
- Check the identifying details on each card: name, KRA PIN and employer details. A card with the wrong PIN is useless to the employee.
- Send each card only to its employee, one person per message, to the e-mail address on the payroll record. Never send a batch to a manager to hand out.
- Record what went where and when, in the client's payroll file: employee, date sent, address used.
- Handle leavers deliberately. Someone who left during the year still needs a card. Confirm a current address with the client before sending.
Clients sometimes prefer to hand cards out themselves. That is fine, as long as the bureau's file shows the date it delivered the set to the client and to whom.
Checking the cards against the P10s
KRA has already seen the year's figures, one month at a time. Kenyan PAYE is filed on the P10 return on iTax and paid by the 9th of the following month. The P9A cards are the same numbers, reorganised by employee. If the two disagree, either a month was declared wrongly or the cards are wrong, and either way the bureau wants to find out before an employee's return is rejected.
A simple year-end reconciliation:
| Check | Source A | Source B |
|---|---|---|
| Total PAYE for the year | Sum of all P9A cards | Sum of the twelve P10 filings |
| Employees covered | Employees with a card | Employees on any month's P10 |
| Each month's PAYE | Month column across all cards | That month's P10 as filed |
| Payments | P10 totals | Payment references recorded |
Achekam does not file or pay Kenyan payroll returns. A person files on the authority's portal and records the reference it gave, and a second person confirms each payment. That record is what makes the last line of the table possible: if every month's filing and payment reference is in the file, the year-end check is a comparison, not an investigation.
Where a month does not agree, find the cause before sending cards. Common ones are a month filed from a draft rather than the approved run, an employee added to the P10 by hand, or an amended return filed directly on iTax and never recorded.
A note on contracted-out clients
If a client has contracted out of NSSF Tier II, its employees' cards will reflect what Achekam calculated, and Achekam does not model contracting out. Read NSSF Tier II and contracted-out employers before issuing cards for such a client, and explain any pension figure that differs from what the scheme or the NSSF reports.
For the deductions that feed the card, and which body collects each one, see Kenyan payroll deductions and who collects them.
Put the P9A run in the bureau calendar for the first working week of January, straight after December's approval, and send clients the date in advance so their staff know when to expect their cards.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
