Featured Case Study
Duka Offline: a shop book that keeps working when the internet doesn’t.
Duka Offline is an offline-first shop book for Kenyan micro-businesses. It records sales, debts (deni) and expenses with no internet, reads M-Pesa messages and matches them to sales and customers, and syncs to a server over the internet or, failing that, by SMS. We designed and built the phone app and the server behind it.
- Sector
- Retail / Micro-business
- Scope
- Product Design + App & Server
- Delivery
- Offline Sync & M-Pesa Matching
- Kept every screen to one question at a time (How much? How did they pay?), in English or Kiswahili, so a sale takes two taps and works with no bundles.
- Matched incoming M-Pesa payments to the sale keyed in for the same amount, or to the customer by phone and name, and showed any gaps in the daily report.
- Backed up automatically when there is internet and by signed SMS when there is not, so records stay safe and nobody can text in fake payments.