Announcing the Esha K Release

Esha – Our Inspirational Marie

This last major release is code-named Esha K in recognition of Esha Omar Athman, a borrower  at Fursa Leo in Mombasa, Kenya.  Esha has been a client at Fursa Leo since July 26, 2011.  In that time, she has taken out 3 business loans and has significantly expanded her business enabling her to uplift the living standards of her family through a new home, better meal, and sending her son to school.

Esha came to Fursa Leo, eight months pregnant seeking start-up capital for her failing ice cube business while her husband struggled to help them pay their bill and provide for their family.  Through Fursa Leo’s mandatory financial literacy program and graduation through three larger loan cycles, Esha has brought her humble ice cube business from failure to prosperity.

Esha K – What’s Inside

Over the past month, we’ve made you an active part of the planning and development of Esha K through our many discussions during our user-meetups.  In all we had more than 6 man-months of features and bugs that were requested. We had to narrow back this work and trim out some nice-to-have features but we’re delighted with how the release is shaping up. Here is what SolDevelo is aiming to deliver by mid-late December

Core Portfolio Operations

For quite the while now, Mifos has lacked the support for daily meetings and the associated loan products. In Esha K, we’ll be adding:

• Support for Daily Meetings
• Daily Loan Repayment
• Daily Savings Collection and Posting

Dashboard on the Homepage

We know that the homepage is a critical area that all users see when they first log on.  It’s got a large amount of empty space that we thought could be put to better use. We want to make that homepage as powerful as it can be so will be adding a dashboard of the key business drivers and statistics in Mifos that you would like to see. Let us know what metrics you want to track so we can add them in.

Chart of Accounts Interface

To improve upon the Mifos-ACC accounting module, we’ll be adding in a more flexible user interface for both adding and modifying the chart of accounts.

File Upload Capabilities

A powerful new feature we’re looking forward to is the file upload module – you’ll now have the ability to upload and attach files to client and account records.  Now you can have one central place to store all your client information including identification, loan applications, etc.

Some other enhancements will include PPI reports developed by Conflux and sponsored by Adhikar, improvements to the search for large databases, the ability to adjust and forgive specific penalties, and the ability to backdate the creation of loan products and client activation dates for data migration purposes.

You can Help

There are a number of features that we had to remove due to resource constraints – we would love for these to make there way into the release and you the community can help make that happen by sponsoring a feature, volunteering, or contributing code as a Specialist.  There’s a wide list of features in the Mifos Backlog that include screen-based reporting, question group templates, improved interface for configuration, SMS push notifications, and more. Help make these other features possible!