paluwagan

A trust ledger for informal savings groups — offline, no login, no backend.

A paluwagan is a savings circle: a fixed group of people who each contribute the same amount every period, and each period one member takes the whole pot. The pot rotates until everyone has received it once. The same idea is known around the world as a ROSCA (rotating savings and credit association), a chit fund, tanda, cundina, susu, hui, ajo, committee, or stokvel.

For generations these groups have run on a paper notebook: a grid of names and periods, with ticks for who has paid and a note of whose turn it is to collect. The notebook works — until it is lost, argued over, or the columns stop adding up.

paluwagan is that notebook, made trustworthy. It runs entirely in your browser, stores everything on your own device, and cannot send your data anywhere. No account, no server, no tracking.

Features

• Create a group — name, contribution amount, currency (₱ PHP by default; also $, €, ₹), frequency (weekly / every 2 weeks / monthly), and a start date. The number of periods always equals the number of members.
• Members and rotation — add or remove members and set the exact payout order: who receives the pot in which period.
• The ledger — for each period, toggle every member's contribution paid or unpaid, and see who is receiving the pot that period.
• Dashboard — the current period, who is collecting now and who is next, how much is in the pot this period, and who still owes.
• Trust scores — each member gets an on-time payment rate as a percentage. This is the "trust" in trust ledger: a plain, shared record of who has kept up.
• Balances — per member, total contributed, total received, and net position across the whole cycle. When a cycle completes with everyone paid, every net settles to zero.
• Full schedule — the complete grid of periods × members, with the payout recipient highlighted and every paid/unpaid mark visible, scrollable on a phone.
• Your data, your control — Export to a JSON file, Import it back on any device, or Delete everything with one confirmed click.

How your privacy is protected

paluwagan is built so it cannot leak your group's data, not merely promises not to.

• It never talks to a network. The page ships with a Content-Security-Policy of connect-src 'none', which the browser enforces: fetch, XHR, WebSockets, and beacons are all blocked. There is no analytics, no telemetry, no "phone home." Even if a future bug tried to send data out, the browser would refuse.
• Everything stays in local storage on your device. Your groups live under a single key in this browser's localStorage. Clearing it (or using the Delete button) removes every trace.
• You move your own data. Export and Import are the only ways data leaves or enters — a file you control, on a transfer you initiate.

Because a paluwagan involves other people's names, whoever records the group should have those members' agreement first. See PRIVACY.md and COMPLIANCE.md for the full, honest detail.

Quickstart

paluwagan is a static site with no build step and no dependencies.

Open it locally — because it uses ES modules, open it through a tiny local server rather than file://:

# from the project directory, any one of these:
python3 -m http.server 4173
# or: npx serve .

Then visit http://localhost:4173/.

Hosted: https://sreenivas-sadhu-prabhakara.github.io/paluwagan/

(The included GitHub Pages workflow deploys the repository root as-is on every push to main.)

Once loaded, the app works fully offline and can be installed as an app on phones and desktops (it registers a service worker to cache the shell).

(Add your own screenshot at docs/screenshot.png; see docs/.)

Running the tests

The domain logic (schedule and rotation building, balances, trust scores, and storage) lives in pure, DOM-free ES modules under src/, with a test suite that uses only Node's built-in test runner — no packages to install.

npm test          # runs: node --test "test/**/*.test.js"

Requires Node 18 or newer (for the built-in node:test runner).

How it is built

• No framework, no build, no runtime dependencies, no CDN, no web fonts. Just HTML, CSS, and vanilla ES modules.
• Pure logic is split into framework-free modules: src/model.js (group, schedule, and rotation), src/settlement.js (balances and trust), and src/store.js (local storage, export/import). All date-dependent functions take the date as a parameter, so the logic is deterministic and testable — the UI passes the real date, the tests pass fixed ones.
• All DOM code lives in src/app.js. Styling is in src/style.css.
• An optional service worker (sw.js) caches the app shell for offline use.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and the Code of Conduct. In short: keep it dependency-free, run npm test, and open a pull request.

Disclaimer

paluwagan is a private record-keeping aid, not a financial product. It is not financial, legal, tax, or accounting advice, and it does not hold, move, or manage money. You and your group remain solely responsible for your own savings arrangement — contributions, payouts, and any disputes. The software is provided under the MIT License, "as is" and without warranty of any kind; the authors accept no liability for any loss, dispute, or damage arising from its use.

License

MIT © 2026 Sreenivas Sadhu