Sahayak — Core Cooperative Management System
A complete core banking and daily ledger system engineered for savings & credit, agricultural, and multipurpose cooperatives. Unifies deposits, shares, loan portfolios, teller sessions, and an offline-first mobile field collection app that balances the entire institution's books in under 5 minutes.
Sahayak: Engineering an Offline-First Core Banking Engine & Daily Ledger for Cooperatives
Savings and credit cooperatives (SACCOS) and agricultural cooperatives frequently face a crippling operational hurdle: "closing the day twice." Tellers balance counter cash in the afternoon, but the institution cannot balance its general ledger until field collectors return from rural doorsteps with physical notebooks, manual receipts, and cash bundles. Sahayak eliminates manual double-entry by unifying member savings, share certificates, loan schedules, teller floats, and an offline-first mobile collector app onto one real-time double-entry ledger that reconciles within 5 minutes of evening close.
Cooperatives were vulnerable to cash discrepancies, portfolio risks, and exhausting audit cycles: • Double Closing Discrepancies: Field collectors operated off paper counterfoils and spreadsheets. Branch staff had to wait until evening to manually re-key transactions, causing frequent cash variance and delayed day closes. • Offline Doorstep Reality: Collectors visit remote member doorsteps with zero mobile network coverage, meaning standard cloud-based banking software crashed or prevented field deposits. • High Portfolio at Risk (PAR): Loan officers struggled to identify overdue accounts early; delinquent accounts frequently sat unnoticed for 60+ days before manual reviews flagged them. • Disconnected Accounting & Share Registrars: Deposits, share dividend distributions, teller floats, and statutory regulator reports (COPOMIS) existed in disconnected files, demanding weeks of manual preparation before annual general meetings (AGMs).
We engineered Sahayak as a resilient, localized core banking system built for local fiscal calendars (BS/AD) and rural fieldwork: • Offline-First Field Collector Mobile App: Collectors view their daily routed rounds, member balances, and collect deposits or loan EMIs with zero network connectivity. All transactions queue locally, issue instant digital SMS receipts, and sync to the main ledger the second a connection is restored. • 7-in-1 Unified Ledger Architecture: All 7 operational domains—Savings Deposits, Share Capital, Loan & Collateral Registry, Employee Payroll, Teller Sessions, General Ledger, and Regulatory Filings—write to the exact same double-entry database. • Strict Teller Float Reconciliation: Sessions require an opening cash float and enforce zero-variance reconciliation against actual physical cash in hand before a teller can close their terminal. • Automated 5-Step Daily Close: A streamlined 5-step operational workflow (Open Day, Counter/Field Collection, Loan Disbursement, Reconciliation, and Day Close) completes the entire branch audit before 6:00 PM.
• Daily Book Closing Slashed from 3 Hours to Under 5 Minutes across multi-branch cooperatives. • Zero Paper Counterfoil Losses: 100% of field deposits and loan repayments are digitally logged on doorstep collection. • 32% Reduction in 30+ Day Loan Arrears via automated early-warning alerts and daily delinquency reports. • 100% Audit Readiness: Continuous real-time trial balance generation eliminates month-end manual accounting catch-up.