Mifos 2.5 (Samiha J) Ships!

Once again a special thank you to Jakub Slawínski, Lukasz Chudy and the entire SolDevelo team for developing and proceeding over Samiha J. Mifos 2.5 is another big release that brings a strong mix of functional improvements, technical enhancements, tools for getting data into Mifos, and integrations with other systems.  Continuing with our 2012 goal of making Mifos 2.0 a functionally complete group lending MIS before we transition development over to Mifos X, Mifos 2.5 smooths out some of the core areas of the product and fills some of the major outstanding gaps.

View the release notes for a full list of all issues resolved.

Mifos Data Warehouse and 11 More Standard Reports now Embedded in Mifos

Easy reporting is always a challenge and a must-have for our users – this release makes available another 11 standard reports that can be directly run in Mifos without having to install any separate components.  Embedding these reports that run off of the Mifos data warehouse was one of the next major phases of the Pentaho integration.  To run these reports all you have to do is configure your second database as the Mifos data warehouse and execute the new batch job that runs ETL job which populates the Mios data warehouse.

Now there is no need to install and run the separate Pentaho application. From the convenience and familiarity of the Reports tab in the Mifos user interface, you can now view and create embedded Pentaho reports that run off of both the Mifos production database and the data warehouse.  These 11 standard reports include:

• Loan Officer Details
• MFI Progress
• Due vs Collected (By Loan Officer | By Branch | By Center)
• Balance Outstanding by Source of Funds
• Funds Movement Report
• Loan Officer Performance Summary (Cumulative | During Period)
• Loan Classification by Product
• Balance Outstanding

SolDevelo has also streamlined a few portions of the reporting UI in Mifos – improving labeling and adding in a date picker.

Revamped Administrative Documents – Generate Receipts, Loan Agreements & More from the UI

Next up in this showcase of the Mifos 2.5 release is the revamping of the ability to generate receipts, account statements, and other administative documents directly from the UI.  This was another outstanding part of the Pentaho integration by replacing adminstrative documents which were running off of BIRT reports.  You now have the ease and flexbility of creating your own administrative document templates as Pentaho reports, uploading them into Mifos, and having these automatically generated during various stages of your workflow.

Currently, you can add these documents at the following stages:

• Account Details (Savings and Loan Administrative Documents – i.e. an Account Statement)
• Account Approval (i.e. printing out a loan agreement or a disclosure statement of financial terms)
• Applying Payment (automatically generate a receipt when a payment is applied)

Mifos 2.5 ships with several default templates which can be downloaded here but the real power lies in creating your own just like you would any custom Pentaho report.

Keep letting us know where you would like to see these documents so we can add them in more places throughout the UI and let us know what templates you need so we can provide better standard ones.

Import Loan and Savings Accounts via Excel Plugin

Another big pain point you continue to face has been data migration and making it easier to get your data into Mifos.  Building off of the Import Clients Excel Plugin that was part of Mifos 2.3, you can now import both loan and saving accounts via spreadsheet. You can backdate disbursal dates and choose any account status providing an easy tool for data migration of historical balances.

Mifos-ACC Accounting Module Integrated into Mifos

For our smaller organizations using Mifos, we know that having integrated accounting is one of the greatest needs. Thanks to the leadership of several Specialists throughout our community, we now have a simple integrated accounting module that you can activate within Mifos.  Led by FinA and Hugo Technologies along with support from Conflux Technologies and Binny Gopinath, Mifos-ACC has now been integrated into Mifos 2.5

Mifos-ACC provides a very simple accounting module directly within Mifos – you can enter in general ledger vouchers for non-portfolio related accounts (i.e. rent or petty cash) and generate simple financial reports like the balance sheet and income statement.  Mifos-ACC by no means is designed to replace a dedicated accounting software but for many of our smallest MFIs this ability to track other branch-level general ledger accounts in Mifos fulfills their accounting needs and frees them from having to install and maintain two separate systems.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0ozbsgQNAg&version=3&hl=en_US]

Watch the video above for a Mifos-ACC demonstration. We’ll share more on the Mifos-ACC accounting module in a follow-up blog post and are eager to get your feedback and testing as this is just the initial release of Mifos-ACC.

Configurable Repayment Order – Pay Overdue Interest First

The standard order of how a payment gets applied in Mifos is Penalties, then Fees, then Interest and then Principal. A number of users let us know on the mailing list that Central Banking Regulations in India were requiring all overdue interest to be collected prior to paying down future principal.  You can now set Mifos up to automatically pay overdue interest first – we’ve added a configuration value to activate the new repayent order enabling all overdue and accrued interest to be paid off first.  For example if you have a current installment of $500 (400 principal and 100 interest) and an overdue installment of $500 (400 principal and 100 interest) and make a payment of $500, it will now be applied as such – paying off the $100 in overdue interest first, the $100 in current interest and then the remaining $300 towards overdue principal.  In the repayment schedule, the interest that is due is called out in parenthesees.

Features Sponsored by Al Majmoua

We also wanted to highlight several features that Al Majmoua sponsored and were gracious enough to share back with the rest of the community. Al Majmoua worked with SolDevelo to build out some enhancements around both question groups and their audi bank import plugin. We encourage any MFIs or Specialists that build or have new features built to share those back with the community so they can be maintained and improved as part of the core codebase.

Role-Based Permissioning at the Question Group Level

Now when you create a question group, you have a role-based permission to set whether it can be added or not.  This is an important internal data control when you have question groups that should only be edited by certain staff members (i.e. accountants, internal auditors, etc.)

Single Smart Select Question Type

Single Smart Select works just like its cousin, Smart Select, bringing you a dynamic dropdown of responses that you narrow down through tags but now with the ability to limit the respondent to selecting only a single response.

Audi Bank Plugin Performance Improvements

We made some tweaks to the plugin so now transaction upload speed is significantly improved when uploading files with a large volume of transactions (500+).

Undo Import Functionality for Audi Bank Plugin

Along with some general user interface improvements to the Import Transactions module, you can now fully undo previously imported transaction files.

These improvements are specific to the Audi Banking plugin so please let us know if you need these to be extended to the other plugins.

Technical Enhancements

For those building applications to work on top of Mifos, we extended the suite of REST APIs to cover three new functions – creating customers, creating loan accounts, and creating savings accounts. Thanks to Kamil Kalfas from SolDevelo for building these – we are looking forward to seeing the offline data collection module that Hugo Technologies is building through these APIs.

Other Contributions

Mifos 2.5 also contains a number of smaller contributions and fixes submitted by community members including patches by Hugo Technologies, PPI improvements from Nayan at Conflux, and UI enhancements by Sarah Ferrier.

What’s Coming in Marie K – our Final Release for Mifos 2.0

We have been actively discussing the proposed features for the Marie K release with the community and will publish and announce that release plan this upcoming week.  There are also a number of in-progress features that will make their way in.  Marie K will be the last major release on the Mifos 2.0 codebase as all new active feature development will start to take place on Mifos X. Stay tuned and get your feature requests in!