Dear Ed Cable Thank you for you enquiry regarding our migration to MIFOS. With the help of our technology partners, we have completed the migration of accounts into MIFOS. A few post migration glitches are being ironed out so that we can go ahead with MIFOS in the coming days. We will be making an announcement soon to the community !!
Since migration was done by our tech partner, Hugo Technologies, we presume that they have used migration tool kits and templates However, I would like to highlight a few of the issues that we faced during migration : 1) The outstanding loan of each customer is a 'given' i.,e it is an absolute figure which cannot change under any circumstances. But MIFOS derives this figure as the difference of of the loan disbursed and amount paid back. This created many problems. 2) In India, the financial regulator has prohibited use of paise (Indian Currency - Rupee- One Rupee= 100 paise) in financial transactions, particularly interest calculations etc., But MIFOS recalculates amounts with decimals resulting in paise. Rounding off leads to overall difference in the sum total of individual loans and the figure of loans as existing in the general ledger/ balance sheet of the MFI. 3) In any MFI, all loans are not repaid in full, i.e, 100 % recovery is not possible . Loans are either - closed by full repayment - full write off by the MFI - compromise or negotiated settlement of dues between MFI and the borrower. A negotiated settlement results in a partial waiver of past principal, past interest , reduction in interest rate, conversion from compound interest to simple interest etc., I will give an example. Date of Loan Sanction : 01-04-2005 Loan Amount Rs. 10,000. @ 18 % p.a. reducing balance . No. of instalments 12 Amount Repaid - Principal - NIL Interest repaid - NIL Upon conversion to MIFOS on 31-03-2012, the system recalculates the interest from the date of sanction till date of conversion. With annual compounding this comes to Rs. 21854. With simple interest the amount of interest comes to Rs. 12,600. Now, if the MFI wants to close the loan by recovering only the principal of Rs. 10,000, and waive entire past interest how to make entries in MIFOS Or if we want to close the loan by recovering principal Rs. 10000 + simple interest of Rs.12,600 how to make entries in MIFOS As I understand, in MIFOS the system will appropriate all payments upto Rs. 21,854 towards interest alone. So, facility for partial / full waiver of past due principal/ past due interest is absolutely essential for any MFI particularly MFIs which have completed a few years of existence, by which time sufficient bad loans would have accumulated to warrant negotiated closure of loans. 4) Risk management : Ours is a thrift based MFI. To assess the amount at risk for each individual borrower/ group, we need the following information at one place - amount of thrift savings of the member - amount of loan outstanding of the member - amount of past interest due - value of the collateral security that can be realised by sale ( gold ornaments, value of mortgaged land , hypothecated machinery etc.,) So capturing value of collateral security is a necessity as the loan amounts become larger and larger with each passing cycle of loans Is it possible to get such a report through MIFOS / Pentaho. 5) Facility for statement of Account : It is a regulatory requirement that each customer/ member of the MFI is given a statement of account of thrift deposit and loan account. Is it possible to get a statement of account in MIFOS / PENTAHO ? 6) Though MIFOS software is available for free, it requires a technology partner or an in house IT team to set up install and migrate to MIFOS. A fair , remunerative fees has to be paid to the technology partners. The amounts quoted by the IT firms are sometimes, beyond the paying capacity of the small, financially weak MFIs. This issue has to be addressed so that all the stakeholders in MIFOS are happy at the end of the day and more and more MFIs can switch over to MIFOS !! 7) How to evaluate the technical competence of the IT partner in installing/ migrating to MIFOS ? With very few installations in each country, it is difficult to choose technology partners. Since collaboration among all stake holders takes place on the internet, is it possible to arrange virtual classrooms where installation, data migration, PENTAHO reporting can be practiced in the presence of experienced volunteers so that all the technology partners, in house IT teams are familiar with various glitches, nuances of MIFOS software ? 8) Overall experience / impression is that it is an excellent software for newly formed MFIs but pretty difficult to migrate for existing MFIs. With regards , -- SAHADEV K 91-40-27811233 MOBILE : 91-94405-79870 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Better than sec? Nothing is better than sec when it comes to monitoring Big Data applications. Try Boundary one-second resolution app monitoring today. Free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Mifos-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-users
