Hazri

The problem

Wherever a daily wage is paid, the record of it lives in a small paper diary — a tick for who came, a scribble for the advance handed over at the gate, and days × rate added up by hand at settlement.

It works until it doesn't. Half days break the arithmetic. A rate that changed mid-season gets applied backwards to days it shouldn't. The advance given in cash three weeks ago is remembered by one person and not the other. And when the worker's count of days disagrees with the diary's, there is no shared record to settle it — just two memories and an argument at the worst possible moment. The diary also gets lost, and takes the season with it.

What we built

Hazri is an offline-first wage diary for anyone who pays by the day — an orchard, a farm, a shop, or a home with a cook, maid or driver.

One tap marks present, a second marks a half day, with quarter-day steps for the days that aren't whole ones. Rates carry an effective date, so changing what someone earns today never rewrites what they earned last month. Advances go in when the cash changes hands, not from memory at settlement.

Settlement is the part we cared most about. An owner can settle whenever they like, and periods never snap to calendar months — real ones run from the last settlement to today. Once a day is settled it locks, and no later balance can count it again. What the owner hands the worker is a statement: dates covered, days worked, earned, advances taken, what's left. Nobody has to take anyone's word for the count.

Hazri records wages but never moves money. The owner pays as they always have; the app keeps the count right.

How we approached it

We wrote the business rules down before any code — twenty-two of them, numbered, covering what a day is worth and what a settlement closes. The app is a reading of that document; where a screen and a rule disagreed, the rule won.

One invariant drove the architecture: exactly one attendance record per worker per day, which every total, calendar and statement reads rather than copying. It is why a correction anywhere shows up everywhere, and it is what makes paid is paid enforceable rather than aspirational.

Offline came first, not last — attendance gets marked in orchards and basements, so writes land on the phone and sync themselves later. And the interface is built for the least confident user: big numbers, and every status carrying a colour, a glyph and a word together so it still reads in greyscale and in direct sun.

Scope of work

Product strategy · Business-rule modelling · UX research with owners · Brand and design system · Native mobile apps (iOS + Android) · Offline-first sync · Shared wage-calculation engine · Hindi + English localisation · Quarter-day attendance · Advance and settlement ledger · Settlement statements · Morning reminders · End-to-end test suite · Marketing site and self-serve account deletion · Internal admin console · App Store and Play listings

The outcome

The full daily loop — mark, advance, settle — is built, and goes to its first owners through TestFlight and Play internal testing ahead of a public launch.

We set one release guardrail, and it isn't a growth number: zero double-paid days, checked against real pilot data by an invariant test rather than by eye. A wage ledger earns trust by being right about money, and that is the only claim worth making before people have used it.

Engagement details

An in-house Kaivon product, built top-to-bottom by the studio: business analysis, brand, design, both apps, the backend and the website. It began as one apple-orchard diary in Himachal, built to work for any daily-wage employer anywhere.