Issuing a digital receipt
A borrower who hands over cash deserves proof immediately — not days later. The Ustawi app issues a digital receipt on-device the instant a payment is recorded, whether or not there is a connection, and reconciles it against the server ledger on sync.
The trust problem this closes
In many legacy field-collection setups, a borrower who pays in a no-signal area has no receipt for days — sometimes none at all. That is a real dispute and audit risk: the borrower has nothing proving they paid, and the institution has no borrower-side record to reconcile against. The Ustawi app generates a receipt at the moment of payment, off-grid or not.
Provisional, then finalized
A receipt issued offline is marked Provisional. Once it syncs and is confirmed against the server ledger posting, it becomes Finalized. The receipt and the underlying collection share the same idempotency key, so they are always provisional together and finalized together — there is never a scenario where one exists without the other.
How the borrower keeps it
- An SMS confirmation of the payment goes to the borrower.
- A printable PDF receipt becomes available once the record syncs to the server.
A receipt affected by a rare sync exception stays visible as “Provisional — under review” rather than silently disappearing. The borrower's proof of payment never vanishes.