Vikasa RDO moved SHG loan recovery into a system of record.
Vikasa RDO arranges SBI loans for Self Help Groups and collects the monthly repayments. That is other people’s money, and it was handled on spreadsheets with no enforced relationships between records, no history of changes and no access control. The system records every proposal, repayment and commission against 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 a control problem as much as a technology problem. A sheet records nothing about who did what and cannot check one record against another. The challenges below followed from that.
Nothing to reconcile against
With no second record to check the first against, errors in applications and in recovery funds could not be detected reliably.
Collected cash with no chain of custody
Cash collected on the bank’s behalf was not tied to a collector and a date, so tracing it was possible only after the fact.
Records that drifted apart
Member assignments and loan records were kept separately with no enforced relationship, so they diverged, and a change of role made handover guesswork.
Proposals assembled by hand
Building a proposal manually took hours, and one wrong figure could lead to rejection later in the process.
Multi-year schedules tracked in a sheet
Repayment tracking across several years is heavy manual work and drifts from the facts the longer it runs.
No queryable current position
Answering where the organisation stood today meant an afternoon of manual aggregation.
Operational decisions in a chat log
Salaries, tasks and daily coordination ran over WhatsApp, where nothing is queryable or kept as a record.
No actor attached to an action
When something went wrong, establishing who was responsible was difficult.
What we built
The real loan lifecycle of proposal, sanction, disbursement and recovery is modelled as transitions on a single record, and not as four documents kept in parallel. Every state change carries the person who made it and the time, which is the property the earlier process lacked.
Roles and permissions as the foundation
Who can see and change what is defined first, because every other control depends on it.
One record per group
Each Self Help Group’s details sit in one place and not on whichever laptop last touched them.
Members bound to their group
A member’s details and payment history sit against the group as a relationship and 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 between stages.
One loan, one record
Approval through to final repayment lives on a single record and not on a separate sheet for each stage.
Collections dated and attributed
What was owed and what arrived appear side by side, each collection carrying the person who took it and the date.
Commission derived, not estimated
The commission VRDO earns is calculated from recorded recoveries and not 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 and not in a separate book kept in step by hand.
Reporting off live data
Reports read current records, which makes a figure defensible when the bank asks for it.
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
Control gaps closed
Once every movement was recorded and attributed, records could be checked against one another, which was not possible before.
Manual assembly automated
Repetitive construction of proposals disappeared, along with the hours and the transcription errors.
One workflow instead of four handovers
Proposal, sanction, disbursement and recovery moved faster once they stopped being four disconnected jobs joined by memory.
Financial control consolidated
Salaries, commissions and accounts are no longer held in three separate places.
Decisions traceable to a record
Decisions now come from reports and not from what somebody remembers about last month.
For an organisation holding money for Self Help Groups and a bank, speed is a convenience. Showing where every rupee went, who handled it and when is the actual requirement.
Tell us what you need.
Share your requirements and one of our engineers will come back to you within one business day.
- No obligation
- A reply within one business day
- Your details stay private
Start with your requirements
Seven short steps that tell us what you need. An engineer reads them before getting in touch.
Share your requirements