ASA has been working very hard for the last three years to fully automate its MIS and FIS reporting for all branches and district offices. Despite wide geographical locations, lack of resources and inherent implementation hazards its steady progress is significantly visible. This article summarizes ASA software solution details, its present implementation status and future plans.

ASA Microfinance Management System (AMMS) is an integrated software solution to automate ASA's micro-credit program. Followings are major features of AMMS:

• It records day to day financial activities in electronic format and then produces management monitoring reports at required frequencies
• It is flexible enough to cater the needs of MFI operations in different countries yet produces standardized MIS and FIS reports for each level of users
• Its unique feature is customizable micro-credit program parameters (e.g. interest rate, amortization, duration etc), which allows countries to offer products without any additional development work

AMMS is divided into two major parts: Branch AMMS and Central AMMS. Following diagram shows how these two parts work together to form a complete software solution.

There are two modules in AMMS. They are Micro-finance and Accounts. Followings are brief feature list of each module.

Micro-finance Module:

• Captures daily loan/savings/security disbursement and collection information
• Client and group management
• Produces loan officer and branch performance measure / monitoring reports

Accounts Module:

• All transactions performed in micro-finance module is automatically posted to accounts module
• Specific accounting transactions (e.g. office expenses, bank receive/payment) can be managed separately
• Tracks fixed assets with configurable depreciation rate
• Produces branch wise income expense report and balance sheet

AMMS is designed as N-tier enterprise solution and special care has been taken to adopt frequent change of business process and methodologies. It has been developed utilizing Microsoft C#.NET, ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server technology. In addition, JIRA (task management system) and SVN (source code repository control system) have also been used in the development life-cycle.

Present status of AMMS implementation at branch level

• Implementation completed successfully for 3157 branches
• 88 Assistant Support Engineer (ASE) looks over the AMMS operation
• Loan Officers (LO’s) enter their daily transactions into AMMS and daily, weekly, monthly and yearly branch reports are prepared from AMMS, reducing complex calculation required to prepare manual summary reports

Present status of AMMS implementation at country level

• AMMS country consolidation module (produces summary reports of all branches) is released on Feb 28th 2010. Initially Dhaka, Mymensingh and Rangpur district data was brought to Head Office to test consolidated reports. Based on the initial experience it is decided that Rangpur and Dhaka district data will be brought to Head Office via RM Office modem at the end of each month and based on the success of those two districts. We will eventually expand the scope of the project by December 31st 2010 and include as many branches as possible.