Field agent banking, offline by default

The cooperative's agents visit markets, farms and villages where coverage comes and goes. Their existing app needed a connection for every action, so agents recorded deposits on paper and re-entered them in the evening. Errors crept in, members waited days to see balances, and reconciliation took the finance team a full week each month.

We started with the promise an agent makes to a member, and designed the system to keep it. Every action is recorded on the device as a signed command with its own identity, issues a receipt immediately, and syncs when the phone reconnects. The server treats each command as idempotent and posts it to a double-entry ledger.

We ran discovery in the field with agents, not only in the head office. That shaped the details: an end-of-day screen separating recorded from confirmed, receipts that work over SMS, and a sync engine that keeps order when a phone has been offline for three days.

Agents now close their day on the device. Members receive a receipt at the moment of deposit and a confirmation when it reaches the ledger. Month-end reconciliation became a daily automated report that the finance team reads rather than rebuilds.