Recordkeeping is an essential practice adopted by enterprises to record the day-to-day financial activities of the business. It is used by entrepreneurs to track their cash flow and assess whether their business is profitable or not. The absence of recordkeeping can lead to the enterprise burning money and not utilising expansion opportunities, and in severe cases, to the closure of the business. A majority of women-led enterprises in India fall under the nano and micro-enterprise category, are largely informal and use traditional or manual bookkeeping methods.

Digital solutions such as recordkeeping applications present an opportunity to bridge this gap, by replacing the drudgery and arithmetic overload involved in manual bookkeeping systems. From 2019-2023, LEAD’s STREE initiative provided technical assistance to the DAY-NRLM to implement interventions targeted towards scalable enterprises under the NRETP. The e-FMS pilot study aimed to test the efficacy of digital ledgers to improve the recordkeeping practices of growth enterprises within the NRETP. Two digital ledger applications, Khatabook and myBillbook, were onboarded for the pilot that was implemented in three districts: Ratnagiri (Maharashtra), Erode (Tamil Nadu), and Tumkur (Karnataka). This report presents key findings from the evaluation.