Welcome to Bloo Mondays,

This weekly newsletter for businesses owners, organisations, team members and solo entrepreneurs (freelancers) — designed to add some colour to the Monday blues and replace it with a touch of Bloo 💙.

Each week we’ll share tips, insights and maybe a meme or two to spark some ideas. So let’s jump right in.

In this week of Bloo Monday’s we’ll be covering:

• 💙 Our NPO Experience — Thulani’s journey building YAT

• ⚠️ Why Admin Matters Now More Than Ever — NPO’s are being regulated more and face de-registration risks if they fail to comply.

• 🎭 Assitej South Africa x Bloo — a look at how the leading theatre and arts group is using our app with their 1 800 network of facilitators

• 🏆 Bloo Money won an award — We won the most Innovative Startup Award at Converge Africa

Thanks to everyone to shared their feedback, gave us a “👍👍👍” review and followed up with an email! Keep them coming and we love to see it!

Non-Profits Deserve Better Systems — Here’s What We Learned

Hey change makers 👋,

We all start non-profits because of a dream of making an impact and for most of us, that dream did not involve financial admin.

Running a non-profit organisation isn’t just noble — it’s nonstop. I think most people underestimate how difficult it actually is. Between applying for funding, managing projects and reporting back to funders. The admin seems to never stop.

I know this because in 2019, I cofounded and ran a non-profit called Young Aspiring Thinkers as a Director. We provided high school learners in township based schools with the skills to unlock their future careers, and tackle the challenge of youth unemployment.

We connected high school learners from township schools to mentors, bursaries, and career opportunities.

We impacted over 5,000 learners, partnered with Oracle, BCG, the Trevor Noah Foundation and other leading organisations. We even got selected to present at ChangeNOW in Paris as one of the world’s top 1 000 education solutions.

Sounds polished, right? I wish it was because we were doing amazing work but behind the scenes we were struggling to manage our operations.

We faced challenges with tracking how we were spending our budget, managing our network of freelance facilitators and reporting back to funders:

• We’d receive program funding from organisations like Oracle, but by the time we got final invoices for transport, catering, and materials, we weren’t sure if we had enough left to meet project deliverables.

• We worked with 10–20 youth freelance facilitators on each program — most of them had never invoiced before because they were final year university students. They’d send bank details on WhatsApp or email. On top of that they were paid by the hour but we had no system to track their check in/check out times.

• When it came time to report to donors, we had gaps everywhere — missing receipts, no job creation data, no personal info from the freelancers we paid.

⚠️ Why This Matters More Than Ever

Post program reporting would take forever as we had to sieve through WhatsApps, emails, spreadsheets and Google folders. If we had a system during our programs this would have made our lives easier.

Reporting used to be important for us back then but it’s even more important now as regulators are watching non-profits more closely.

• In early 2025, over 6,000 NPOs were deregistered due to non-compliance with financial reporting requirements, with more than 203,000 others at risk.

• New rules like Financial Action Task Force's Recommendation 8 now require NPOs to implement stricter anti-money laundering controls, with zero room for “informal” systems

Non-profits do REALLY important work in our communities to advance the SDG goals and provide essential services to some of the most vulnerable individuals in our society.

Admin shouldn’t hold them back. Which is why at Bloo Money having experienced this, we’re passionate about giving you relief from admin.

• 📦 Clean record-keeping – All freelancer invoices stored by project – Upload budget docs + spending logs

• 🧾 Built-in audit trail – Export ready-to-submit financial reports – Trace payments, proof of work, and timestamps stored safely on a linked Google Drive through our app.

• 👥 Freelancer on-boarding – Collect personal info for employment reporting – Auto-flag missing or invalid invoice data

Empowering you, so you can focus on impacting the communities you dreamed of when you started.

💡 Use Case: Assitej South Africa x Bloo Money

Assitej South Africa is building the sector of theatre for young audiences in South Africa through supporting and developing the artists, empowering education through the performing arts, creating strategies for access to the arts, and advocating for the role of the arts as an essential right of every child and young person.

We’ve helped them scale their invoicing with their network of +1 800 freelance facilitators across all nine provinces in South Africa 🇿🇦.

• Separate projects — the team can link invoice payments and freelancers according to the multiple projects they work on at the same time.

• Empower their freelancers — providing their facilitators with an easy to use app to submit their invoices to get paid.

• Easier reporting — invoices and payments all in one place, making it easy for their team to report to funders for future projects.

🖥️ Creating Projects Using Bloo Money

In this video we’ll show you how to create and manage projects using Bloo Money. This feature is especially useful to Non-Profits and Businesses who report on programs or impact projects.

The demo video shows you step-by-step how to add details like project images, dates, and budgets, and how to manage team members and their permissions.

Follow along and set up your next or current project accordingly.

It’s Easy, Try It Out For Yourself:

• Getting started → – Set up your first project in under 10 mins

• Book a call with us → – Let’s chat if you’d like to learn more

🏆 In The News: Bloo Money won an award

We’re excited to announce we won most Innovative Startup Award at the Converge Africa Startup Showcase. An event for leading financial services and digital commerce companies.

After pitching our vision to an audience of +100 investors and business owners, we were awarded the most innovative startup out of the 8 selected to pitch.

This award is a testament to the work which we’ve been doing with businesses to build an innovative solution so they can work with their freelancers or suppliers easier.

A big thank you to all our customers and early adopters who have trusted Bloo Money with their business 🙌. We’re looking forward to adding more colour as we continue to build one amazing feature at a time.

🔥 Let’s connect

That’s it for this week folks and looking forward to seeing you again next week Monday.

In the meantime if you have any questions please do let us know. And before we forget, we’d love to start featuring some businesses in our network on this newsletters.

If that’s you, let us know!