Three desks read one agricultural file, and the committee receives three different answers to the same ratio.
For banks and microfinance institutions that lend to agriculture. Each answer was computed correctly, from a different definition, by someone who had no reason to think there was another.
On a branch network, variation is not the exception. It is the distribution.
The reading a file receives depends on who picked it up, what else was on their desk that week, and whether anyone senior was free that afternoon. When nobody is, the branch telephones head office or does not, and the paper still reaches committee looking settled. On an agricultural book the spread is wider, because season, price and buyer move together and not every officer has lent against that crop before.
When the evidence is a photograph of a ledger
For a microfinance institution the constraint is rarely the officer. The record is thin, the proof is a phone photograph of a handwritten book and a mobile money history, repayment depends on a harvest still to come, and the loan is too small to justify a senior reader. The hardest parts to read end up assumed. Here the photograph is the evidence, and it is read as the page it is: inputs bought before planting, sales after the last harvest, the gap before the next.
What works today: one standard on every desk
Deployed inside your institution, LitFin Intelligence reads every file the same way, against your own credit policy: a paddy grower's seasonal line, a poultry unit's working capital, a farmers' group's shared loan. It works for individual loans, group loans and whole portfolios, in English and Swahili. What reaches your committee is one number, with the basis it was computed on, instead of three.
The senior reader beside every officer
The senior reading sits beside the officer while the file is open, in the branch or in the field, and when an officer moves on the reasoning stays with the file.
Your institution keeps every decision
It shows which evidence mattered and why, and names every gap, starting with the one that would most complete the file. It does not lend and does not decide; your officers and committee do.
Where this is going: the chain, the group and the season
We are building the appraisal of a whole value chain as one case, groups a lender can finance with every member visible beneath the group, and a way to follow a financed season while there is still time to act, with village-based agronomists on the ground. This part is in design and early build. It is not live yet.