Understanding the VICOBA fund ledger
A VICOBA is not a single running balance — it is a fund with several distinct movements happening at once. Ustawi models each group's cycle as one fund ledger through which contributions, internal loans, interest and fines all flow, so a group's financial position is always a single source of truth.
One ledger per group, per cycle
When a cycle opens, its fund ledger is initialized. Every meeting entry and every internal loan movement posts into that one ledger for the duration of the cycle. Modelling the group as a flat account would collapse these into a single number and lose the structure that the share-out later depends on — so the ledger keeps the movements distinct while still rolling up to one position.
What flows through it
- Contributions — shares members buy meeting by meeting, the savings stake that grows the fund.
- Loans out to members — internal lending from the pooled fund to individual members.
- Interest — earnings on those internal loans as members repay.
- Fines — penalties collected for missed contributions or lateness.
- Social fund — welfare contributions, tracked distinctly from shares because they are treated differently at share-out.
Why a single source of truth matters
Because everything posts to one ledger, the group's position at any point in the cycle is directly readable rather than reassembled from separate tallies. At cycle close, the same ledger is what the share-out is calculated from — the distributable fund is exactly what the ledger accumulated, less the social fund set aside.
The fund ledger is the group's own pooled money and internal lending. An institution-to-group loan is your loan book and is tracked separately on the lending engine, not inside the group's fund ledger.