Page Comparison

• Translation into Spanish
• Translation into French

• Create new clients
• Create new loans
• Enter repayments

• Create new clients
• Create new loans
• Enter repayments

• See Offline - Mobile
• SPANISH

• Dashboard reporting
• Ability to analyze KPIs, especially risk metrics
• Approvals for new clients, loan applications, savings accounts, etc.

• Client management - search/view clients/groups/centers, creation of centers, groups, and clients (incl. taking/attaching client photos, additional client info, attaching pictures of ID cards), GPS tagging of client business/home/group
• Loan account management - view balance and transaction history, repayments (incl. ability to apply fees), loan application submission, approval process, and disbursement (incl. attaching required documents, photos of collateral, etc.)
• Savings account management - view balance and transaction history, make deposit, make withdrawal, attach documents
• Data volumes - loan officers manage 400+ clients and need all client and loan/savings account data available to view and transact in offline mode. During a given lapse in connectivity, a loan officer typically interacts with 50 clients.

Client Information

• Name, tribe, quater, date of admission, issued by, date of issue,  and
  now for contribution labels.
• Name, date , name of member you are contributing
  to, amount, debt.
  

Transactions

• Registration fees, annual dues, rally dues, harvest thank givings,
• admission of new members, evangelism, pastor s visit, prison visit, hospital visit, church contribution.

I think we are over-simplifying the problem. By treating it as a technical problem where we need to store some of the data offline. My opinion is that storing data offline is merely a technical detail and possibly the easier part to accomplish.

For me, the areas that we need to design more is – how will the process work and how will the data syncing with server be accomplished gracefully?

a)      Which use cases will be available during offline operations and what is the need? – validate this with the end-user organization

b)      New customers and accounts –

-          Customer onboarded or loan created offline – in the offline module a customer ID is allocated (for example: new customer “Steve” was allocated an ID of 1999 in the offline) – an ID is needed as some kind of reference has to be given back to the customer or written down on their paper application form

-          Before this data was synced with server, other customers were onboarded on the server – with IDs 1999 till 2004

-          Now when you sync offline data with server, Steve may get an ID of 2005. How will this be synced up? Perhaps an external ID needs to be allocated. In such a case, how will we ensure that external IDs are unique across all offline use?

c)       Similar issue with transaction ID – receipt issued to customer with one transaction ID or reference number, but when the transaction is synced with server, we may not be able to retain the same transaction ID

d)      Reflecting the transaction date/time on the server with the same date/time when the transaction happened in the field

e)      Server side validations

Example: Savings withdrawal – balance is blocked on server due to the account being part of a guarantee.

How will we ensure that withdrawal attempt fails?

f)       How will we ensure that an offline savings withdrawal will not be followed by an online withdrawal by a fraudster?