Visit projectKarang Taruna RT-6 collected jimpitan the way most neighbourhood groups do: cash in hand, numbers in a notebook, recounted at the end of the night. It worked, but every recount was a chance to lose money, and nobody could see how the totals were reached. eKartar replaced that ledger.
The problem with counting by hand
Two people counting the same pile of coins would land on two different numbers. Reconciling them meant starting over. Residents had no visibility either: money went out, and the only report was word of mouth at the next meeting.
What it does
Records each house's contribution as it is collected, so the total is final the moment the round ends
Exports any period straight to Excel for the treasurer's records
Publishes results to residents over WhatsApp with a collection photo attached as proof
Keeps a per-house history, making gaps and disputes easy to settle
How it is built
Laravel Filament gave a full admin interface without hand-building CRUD screens, which mattered for a project maintained by one person in spare hours. It runs on my own hardware rather than a managed host, so running cost is effectively zero.
Layer | Choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
Application | Laravel Filament | Admin panel and CRUD out of the box |
Runtime | Nginx, PHP-FPM, OPcache | Tuned pool sizing keeps response times flat on modest hardware |
Hosting | Home data center | No recurring cost for a volunteer-run project |
Deployment | Deployer, GitHub Actions | Push to deploy, with rollback if a release misbehaves |
Storage | Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2 | Proof photos on R2, database backups offsite on B2 |
Result
Collection nights end with a number everyone agrees on, and residents see where their contributions went without having to ask.