Vikasa RDO turned SHG loan recovery into a system of record.
Vikasa RDO arranges SBI loans for Self Help Groups and collects the repayments each month. That is other people's money, and it was being handled on spreadsheets — no enforced relationships between records, no history of who changed what, no access control. Money went missing. We rebuilt it so that every proposal, every repayment and every commission carries a person and a date.
- Client
- Vikasa RDO (VRDO)
- Sector
- Microfinance and Self Help Groups
- Engagement
- SHG management software
The problem
Holding other people's repayments in a spreadsheet is not really a technology problem — it is a control problem. A sheet has no concept of who did what, and no way to check one record against another. This is what that produced.
Nothing to reconcile against
With no second record to check the first against, false loan applications and misused recovery funds were not just possible — they happened.
Collected cash with no chain of custody
Money collected on the bank's behalf was taken by staff. With nothing binding a collection to a collector and a date, it could only be traced forensically, after the fact.
Records that drifted apart
Member assignments and loan records were maintained separately with no enforced relationship, so they diverged — and a role handover became guesswork.
Proposals assembled by hand
Building a proposal manually took hours, and a single wrong figure could get the whole thing rejected downstream.
Multi-year schedules tracked in a sheet
Repayment tracking across years is heavy manual work, and it drifts further from the truth the longer it runs.
No queryable current position
Answering "where do we stand today?" required an afternoon of manual aggregation before anyone could even begin to decide anything.
Operational decisions in a chat log
Salaries, tasks and day-to-day coordination happened over WhatsApp, where nothing is queryable and nothing is retained as a record.
No actor attached to an action
When something went wrong, establishing who was responsible was genuinely hard — which is its own category of risk.
What we built
We modelled the real loan lifecycle — proposal, sanction, disbursement, recovery — as transitions on a single record rather than as four documents maintained in parallel. Every state change carries the person who made it and the time they made it, because that is the property the old process was missing.
Roles and permissions as the foundation
Who can see and change what is defined deliberately and first, because every other control in the system depends on it holding.
One record per group
Each Self Help Group's details live in one place, rather than distributed across whichever laptop last touched them.
Members bound to their group
A member's details and payment history sit against their group as a relationship, not as a row copied into another sheet.
The proposal lifecycle as one path
Create, submit, sanction and disburse are transitions on one record, so nothing is lost in the handover between stages.
One loan, one record
Approval through to final repayment lives on a single record instead of a separate sheet for each stage of its life.
Collections dated and attributed
What was owed and what actually arrived sit side by side, each collection carrying the person who took it and the date they took it.
Commission derived, not estimated
The commission VRDO earns is calculated from recorded recoveries rather than reconstructed at the end of a quarter.
Payroll in the same ledger as the money it relates to
Salaries and accounts sit with the transactions they draw on, instead of in a separate book that has to be kept in step by hand.
Reporting off live data
Reports read current records — which is what makes a figure defensible when the bank is the one asking.
Work planned and evidenced
Daily tasks are assigned and reviewed in one place, so people know what is expected and can show what they did.
The result
The gap the malpractice depended on closed
The irregularities relied on nobody being able to check a record against another. Once every movement was recorded and attributed, that precondition no longer existed.
Manual assembly automated away
The repetitive construction work disappeared, taking both the hours and the transcription errors with it.
One workflow instead of four handovers
Proposal to sanction to disbursement to recovery moved faster once it stopped being four disconnected jobs joined by memory.
Financial control consolidated
Salaries, commissions and accounts stopped being three separate conversations held in three separate places.
Decisions traceable to a record
Decisions started coming from reports rather than from what somebody remembered about last month.
When you are holding money for Self Help Groups and a bank, being faster is a convenience. Being able to show exactly where every rupee went, who handled it and when, is the actual requirement.
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