Duka Books

Duka Books gives Kenya's corner shops real books without an app, a form or an accountant. The problem: Kenya has about 7.4 million micro, small and medium establishments (KNBS 2016), and the neighbourhood duka is the most common. Most keep records in an exercise book and money in M-Pesa. A lender can't read either, so credit often means Fuliza overdrafts and other costly short-term loans. Bookkeeping apps ask owners to change how they work, in a language that often isn't theirs. What it does: owners send what they already have to a WhatsApp number, in Swahili. - Ledger photos: Muse Glimmer 30B reads handwritten pages and checks them against the written total. - Receipt piles: SAM 3 finds each receipt in one photo and numbers it, and each crop is read on its own. - M-Pesa and Fuliza SMS: exact parsers, with no model. A Fuliza draw is booked as a loan, not income, and a transaction code can't be booked twice. - Confirm or fix: nothing reaches the books without a tap. "Si sahihi" opens a line-by-line fix, and each fix becomes an example for that shop. - Questions: "faida wiki hii?" is answered by Llama 3.1 8B calling tools over the journal. A figure guard rejects any number no tool returned. - Reports: an evening summary and a bilingual monthly profit-and-loss PDF a SACCO or bank can read. What's live: the WhatsApp bot on a Meta test number. A real phone sent an M-Pesa SMS and a handwritten ledger photo through to the journal on Nov 1, then asked for its profit and P&L PDF. Voice notes still use a stub transcript. All figures are test data; it has not yet been used by a real shop. All code was written during the event, from an empty repo (first commit Oct 27, 2026).