Portfolio Tools: requirements discussion

[Guest]

.

[KFLiaison]

This thread is being opened as a place to converge on a set of requirements for Portfolio Tools that we'd like to see Kiva offer.  The existing spreadsheets and other developer tools may be part of this, but please offer your input.  I hope to provide a coherent list for Gerard at the KF Liaison call in late August, 2009.

--Diane.

[RichardF]

Operations:

• Substantively enhance the website’s listings search capabilities, such as by adding a “My Searches” page for saving the settings, including search capabilities related to Kiva’s operational definition of poverty.
• Modify the “My Basket” page to allow for adding a “$0.00 Total” amount.  This would signify the lender wants to “Bookmark” the loan by adding it to the “Wish List.”  Because $0.00 dollars would be subtracted from the “Amount Left to Fund,” adding the listing to the basket would not prevent any other lenders from making a loan to it.  Consequently, the basket clock can be turned off for these entries to the basket, allowing the lender to track a listing for as long as desired without it falling out of the basket.  To facilitate this process, a “Bookmark” button could be added to listings on the Lend page and Business Profile page.  Alternatively, simply adding “$0.00” to the drop-down list could invoke the bookmark/wish list feature.
• Rethink the lending checkout process to guard against the possibility of a form of “denial of service attack” in which listings can be prevented from being funded, possibly even past the listing expiration time, by holding listings in baskets without checking out.  Implemented hand-in-hand with enhanced search capabilities, the legitimate use of the basket time can be greatly reduced to still support shopping while helping to guard against sabotage.

[AccountAbility]

I would like to see several tools added. 

1. Since it is "MY" portfolio, I would like the date "I" loaned to be one of the fields which could be used for sorting.

2. I would like to have the ability to use hierarchical sorts -- that is, sort first by active status and then by date I loaned.  (There are of course other desirable combinations.)

3. When a loan defaults, I would like to see a transaction posted showing the balance of my loan being written off.

4. Since it is "My Portfolio" I would like to see a totaling of the amount I have outstanding on each loan, which together with my available credits would constitute the actual total of My Portfolio.

5. Of course Ian's spreadsheet has numerous enhanced tools which should be incorporated into the website itself as much as is feasible.

Dan

[JohnR]

Not sure if this counts as being within the "My Portfolio" area, so I apologize if I'm out of bounds, but I'd like it if the Transactions totaled the credits from any one borrower on any one day.  I get a lot of .50, .50, .50, .50; on the e-mail notice it will show as $2.00, can't it show that way in the Transactions listing, too?

John

[AccountAbility]

John - I think that is because the borrower's terms resulted in 4 repayments.  It just doesn't get posted until Kiva runs the monthly process.  If a lender was tracking the actual repayment terms with the transactions posted, he would need that level of detail.

I will admit it is cumbersome for lenders who have been conditioned to follow a monthly cycle.  But many of the borrowers are on weekly (or other) cycles.

Dan

[Leslie]

This isn't a tool request....but not sure where else to put it.

I'm pretty sure until recently, the entire portfolio could be sorted, not just the page I was looking at. This was extremely useful, especially when I wanted to see all my loans sorted by country.

Now I can only sort the page I am looking at, one page at a time.

I know I can get this information by either exporting my portfolio or my transactions, but there are times when I just want to look at this online.

[Diane R]

Leslie, you'll be happy to know that this problem should disappear in August, according to what Gerard told me on the KF Liaison call this past week:

• The portfolio is still sorted only page-by-page, so lenders with more than 50 loans have no way on Kiva to sort them all by any criteria. Also, sorting the loans by "Loan Term/Start Date" is a text sort so that e.g. "12 months" comes before "2 months".
  Response:  These items have been fixed and are scheduled to be released in the next iteration (in about two weeks' time).
  

--Diane.

[Limesarah]

I would like the handy little chart on one's borrower page withe percentage of loans by country, sex, field, etc to show up on the Porfolio page as well, preferably with a way to display those statistics for each category of loan (fundraising, paying back, repaid, etc). 

[alan]

It would be interesting to know just how the gender distribution is calculated. I initially started out with a decision to fund women's loans only, but last month in the frenzy to fund Bolivian group loans I inadvertently contributed to one with a male group leader, thus making one group loan. Now I seem to have 4.9% male loans, but one loan counts for 1.8% of my portfolio. 

With reference to Richard's idea to allow a contribution of $0.00 to add a loan to a wish list, that would be one way of implemeting the wish list idea. Another would be to add a button to both the sorted listing pages and to the loan description to "Add to Wish List". Then a link to "My Wish List" would produce a list of loans in the usual format with the usual sorting options but containing only the loans in the wish list. The "Add to Wish List" button would show up as "Remove from Wish List." One could go from there to lend in the usual way. It might be a bit cleaner than having a mixture of $0 and $25 loans in the basket. It would also be a way to quickly produce a shortened list of possibles that one might wish to investigate more deeply. For example, I might decide to fund 4 loans, but I may preselect 10 that look initially interesting, and then pare down the list.

[RichardF]

Alan, I prefer the "purist" version of a Wish List too.  I'm just trying to also brainstorm some ideas that might require minimalist engineer work to get this up and running asap.