About
It started as one group's spreadsheet.
A savings group had kept its book in a workbook for years. It worked, until it did not.
The workbook held everything: members down the side, twelve months across, Hisa and Jamii, a sheet for loans, a sheet for the cash book, and a share-out worked out by hand at the end of the year. It was the group’s institutional memory, and only one person could really open it.
The trouble was not that anyone was careless. It was that a spreadsheet cannot refuse. A loan sheet will let you charge interest per month when the group agreed to charge it once. A share-out will let the parts miss the pool by a few shillings. A total will keep showing the number it last calculated, whether or not the rows beneath it still say the same thing. And the one file lived on the one laptop, so a member who wanted to check their own balance had to ask.
What we built instead
Horizon Vikoba keeps the same book, in the same order, with the same words: Hisa, Jamii, Mikopo, Riba, Gawio. What changed is what the book will and will not allow.
Who it is for
Groups that already run. Groups that have a chairperson, an accountant and a secretary, that meet monthly, that lend to their own members and share out at the end of the year. Horizon Vikoba does not tell a group how to run itself. It keeps the book the group has decided to keep, and refuses to let that book contradict itself.
How it runs
Pages are rendered on the server and ship almost no JavaScript, which is a design decision about who uses this: a treasurer on a five-year-old phone, on a connection that comes and goes, at a meeting. Every report is also laid out to print, because the annual meeting still happens on paper.
You can use Horizon Vikoba as a hosted service, or run it yourself against any PostgreSQL database you control. Ask us which makes sense for your group.