The purpose of the project is to design a complete system for co-operative societies commonly referred to as saccos.
By definition, a sacco is basically a micro-finance institution formed by a group of like minded individuals usually working in the same organisation or group of related organisations e.g banks, NGOs, travel bureaux, airlines, etc.
The sole purpose of this grouping is to mobilize savings and advance to members loans at good rates - usually lower than banks. An advantage with the saccos is that the loan is securable by other members unlike banks where the applicant is solely responsible for the provision of security.
The current trend in saccos has been the movement towards a fosa system - banking service offered mostly by the big saccos. Of course we expect that in the near future, the relatively smaller saccos will offer the same service as well. The traditional services of back-office operations are still prevalent in both the big and small saccos.
The bank office operations involve:For saccos that offer front office operations, members maintain bank-like accounts; they can make deposits here and unlike the back-office accounts can make withdrawals.
Some saccos insist that membership of the front office is drawn only from back-office membership i.e. one must be a member in the back-office system.
For front office, when a back-office loan application is approved, money is transfered into the member's front office account from where they can withdraw. Payments to the loan are also drawn from the front office account. Many saccos also offer short term loans based on the front office savings.
Anyhow, the front office system can host multiple accounts per member just like banks with different features such as interest rate. In the back office on the other hand, a member has only one account to which deposits are made on a known frequency i.e. monthly, fortnightly, etc
The Project:The target OS is a windows environment preferably XP as it is the commonest OS in many saccos that already have computers
A lot of code in C++ and SQL has so far been written, but obviously it still needs a lot of work to ensure it actually works. The SQL code is for the generation of the necessary reports. I did design a lot of reports using Crystal Reports but, maybe we could change to something readily available.
Database is currently SQL Server but it would be nice if MySQL could be supported as it is free and readily available.
Modules:others include user management and logins and perhaps those that you might think about.
Participation: