Table of contents
Definition
In software development, most implementation efforts are dedicated to solving real-world problems,challenges that come with their own rules, standards, and most importantly domain knowledge [↗].
Software teams must codify this knowledge. In the context of banking and finance, this includes concepts like simple and compound interest, double-entry bookkeeping, and fiscal years. These requirements are commonalities that almost all financial systems share.
Apache Fineract [↗] codifies the functionalities needed to build out a management system a typical microfinance [↗] busienss will need.
This includes everything from savings account for unbanked and underserved communities to managing lending activities.
The latter (Lending) makes up the majority of the functionalities offered by Fineract, or to put another way providing credit is a big part of microfinance and there are many cogs involved, most of which Fineract attempts to cover.
Fineract takes on the form of a backend [↗] API [→], ontop of which organization and client facing applications can be built on top of.
Use Cases
Key Functionalities
- Loan Management: Allows for the creation of loan products and management of loans to individuals and entities.
- Savings and fixed deposite accounts: Makes it possible to open and manage client savings account.
- Share Product: Allows for the tracking and management of share sale to clients.
- Built in accounting: The backend has accounting principles baked-in and also allows the organization to fine-tune them based on their business setup. For example, setting charts of accounts, accounting periods, etc.
- Reporting: A general reporting system allows the organization generate reports on products offered, be it on savings accounts or loan performance, etc.
- Organizational management: The backend supports a layed organizational structure and access levels.
Benefits
- Interoperability: Its API-first architecture makes it easy to share data across different systems integrated with the same Fineract instance.
- Cost Efficiency: Teams save significant time and resources by not having to build and maintain complex financial logic from scratch.
- Reliability & Support: Beyond being a robust technical backend, it is backed by a large community and a pool of experts available for support and development.
Resources
Setting it up
The Installing Fineract tutorials [→] should help with that.