Ledgers, loans, interest and audit trails
Software for fintech, lending and stokvels
We built The Stokvel App on an append-only ledger with two-person control on every financial entry, because a savings club is a bank with better snacks.
What goes wrong, and what we do about it.
Balances are stored, not computed
A stored balance can be wrong and nobody can prove when it went wrong.
An append-only transaction ledger. The balance is derived from the entries, so it cannot disagree with its own history.
One person captures and approves
No separation of duties, which means no defence when a figure is questioned.
Two-person control: whoever captures a financial entry cannot be the one who approves it.
Identity is typed in by hand
A transposed digit in an ID number breaks every check downstream.
The ID document is read and the fields checked, with manual entry available when the photograph is poor.
What we build for it.
The ledger
The part that has to be right.
- Append-only transactions, balances computed never stored
- Two-person control on every financial entry
- Full audit log against every action
- Roles with a fixed permission matrix
Lending
Out, back, and what it cost.
- Loan origination with an approval workflow
- Interest runs, deliberately manual so defaulters are marked first
- Payment allocation between interest and principal
- Eligibility checked by ID number across every year
Members
Who is in, and what they are owed.
- Member profiles with ID verification
- Premium collection and tracking
- Year-end close with dividends and write-offs
- Notifications by email, SMS or WhatsApp
What this has to answer to
- POPIA
- FICA-supporting identity checks
- Immutable audit trail
The services this uses
Questions about fintech and lending.
Are you a registered financial services provider?
No, and we are not giving financial advice. We build the software a financial operation runs on. Licensing, and whether your activity needs it, is a question for your compliance advisor, and we would be wary of a developer who answered it for you.
Why is the interest run manual?
Because a stokvel needs to mark who has not paid before interest is charged, and an automatic monthly job would charge them anyway. It is a deliberate design decision, not a missing feature.
Can you read an ID document as part of onboarding?
Yes. We built Jonga OCR for exactly this, and it is live. It reads the SA smart card, the green book, the driver licence and ICAO passports, and it returns null rather than a guess for anything it cannot read.
Tell us what your business is running on right now.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no slide deck. We will tell you whether this is something we can build and roughly what it would take. If it is not a fit, we will say so on the call.