Recording a cash collection offline
On a rural route an agent can go hours with no connectivity. The Ustawi app records every collection on-device and syncs it later — engineered so that a retry can never post the same cash twice. That single guarantee is what keeps the field-cash trail trustworthy.
How the offline collection flow works
- 1Select the borrowerFrom the day's worklist, against a specific loan and installment — so the payment is never recorded against the wrong obligation.
- 2Enter the amountThe collection is captured on-device instantly, whether or not there is a signal. The agent sees it saved immediately.
- 3Queue with an idempotency keyA unique idempotency key is attached to the local write before it is queued for sync.
Why the idempotency key matters
An idempotency key is what makes “try again” safe. When connectivity returns, the queue syncs and the server deduplicates by that key — so even if the same queued write is sent twice after a dropped connection, it is only ever posted once. The agent's phone can resend as many times as a flaky network forces it to, and the ledger still records exactly one posting.
A naive retry-on-reconnect that posts the same collection twice is one of the classic ways field cash reconciliation breaks down — the ledger shows money that was never collected twice over. The idempotency key is engineered specifically so this cannot happen.
When a sync genuinely fails
A genuine failure — a malformed payload or a mismatched loan reference — is not silently dropped. It lands in a recoverable exception queue and is resolved by an operations supervisor through the Collections & Delinquency app. Nothing disappears; a broken write stays visible until a human clears it.