Hi Stephen, Great to hear from you again! I've moved this email over to the mifos-users list, since it's more appropriate for that forum.
For such a small client base, I would strongly recommend entering the data by hand. You will have to back-date the system date on the computer (to the date of the loan with the oldest disbursal date) and move it forward as you're entering transactions and new loans. You'll need to enter the centers, groups, and client one-by-one, but you can use the bulk-loan-creation feature to create loans in bulk and the collection sheet entry pipeline to enter in weekly transactions. This process requires careful planning and coordination-- but it's very doable. The cost of hiring data entry personnel should also be quite affordable. Jitegemea, one of the early adopters of Mifos, migrated about 2000 clients using this approach and it worked well for them. They used recent college graduates from Nairobi as data entry clerks-- at a very affordable rate. If your MFI has savings accounts-- I'd recommend just migrating the opening balances of the account and not the withdrawal/deposit history. This is all that most MFIs require. Let me know if you have any other questions. I sure Khadija Shamte, at Adept Systems in Nairobi (who drove the Jitegemea deployment) would be happy to chat with you about their approach. Cheers, Emily. > -----Original Message----- > From: Stephen T. Kaufman [mailto:] > Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 1:15 PM > To: Mifos functional Mifos > Cc: Joel Shuflin > Subject: [Mifos-functional] How to create loans that were in the past > > We are implementing Mifos at an MFI in Ghana. The MFI has about 300 > clients > that they want to enter. The loans have been taken out on various dates > in > the past 1-3 years. All the current tracking is paper based, and they > are > trying to migrate into Mifos. > > We are running Database Version 204; Subversion Revision Number > v1....@13431 > > Is there an established practice for doing this? Can anyone share the > steps > to do it either in bulk from spreadsheet or one by one through the UI. > Can > things be "back dated". I saw the spreadsheet on the mifos.org site, > but I > am not clear on how to do a load from it. > > I thought I saw a thread on this once, but can't find it. > > > Stephen Kaufman > Vice President > Global Business Assist (gba.org) > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > ------- > Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San > Francisco, CA > -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the > Enterprise > -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source > participation > -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: > SFAD > http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H > _______________________________________________ > Mifos-functional mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-functional ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Mifos-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-users
