What is Sukrit Nidhi?

Sukrit Nidhi is the accounting and audit platform used by the NGO to keep every one of its centres on a single, consistent set of books — while still preserving the operational independence each centre needs. “Sukrit Nidhi” (निधि) is the Sanskrit word for treasury.

This chapter answers three questions:

What problem does Sukrit Nidhi solve?
How is the platform structured?
What guarantees does it give the auditor?

The problem

A multi-centre NGO faces two competing needs. Each centre records donations, pays rent, maintains its own donors, and closes its own month. But the NGO itself owes trustees, donors, and regulators a unified view — an 80G receipt trail, FCRA segregation, a head-office income & expenditure report, and an audit trail that can be independently verified without having to trust any one person inside the organisation.

The architecture

Sukrit Nidhi uses a two-plane model. Each plane has its own database so one centre can never accidentally (or deliberately) see another centre’s transactions:

Control Planeusers, roles, tenants, audit log

←→

Tenant Plane: Punedonations, expenses, attachments

Tenant Plane: Mumbaidonations, expenses, attachments

Tenant Plane: …one DB per centre

The Control Plane stores everything that is NGO-wide — user accounts, role grants, tenant metadata, the audit log, and the consolidation read-models. The Tenant Plane is where the day-to-day financial data lives: each centre gets its own isolated database with its own donors, vendors, donations, expenses, and attachments.

A routing layer (the tenant router) watches every query and sends it to the correct database based on the logged-in user’s tenant context. You never have to choose a database explicitly — if you signed into Pune, the system only talks to Pune’s DB. Head-office (NGO) views use explicit cross-tenant queries through the Control Plane, and those are read-only by design.

The three guarantees

Every mutation in Sukrit Nidhi is backed by three overlapping safeguards:

Guarantee	What it means	Where you see it
Append-only audit log	Every create / edit / void writes a hash-chained row that can never be updated or deleted from the application layer.	`Audit log` in the sidebar.
Period lock	Once the Tenant Admin closes a month / FY, no back-dated edits can touch those dates.	`Period locks` in the sidebar.
Signed audit bundle	A one-click ZIP containing the ledger, the hash chain, and an Ed25519 signature. Auditors verify it offline.	`Audit bundles` in the sidebar.

You don’t need to be a security engineer to benefit from these. As long as you record transactions normally, the guarantees compose automatically. The verifier chapter shows how to prove to an outsider that nothing has been tampered with.

Who uses what

Sukrit Nidhi has three distinct kinds of user. The sidebar and landing page you see depends on which one you are:

Platform Admin (Sukrit Nidhi staff) — runs the platform, provisions tenants, oversees audit health. Never records transactions in any tenant.
Tenant Admin — senior accounts role for one tenant. Invites users in the tenant, approves expenses, locks periods, builds audit bundles.
Tenant User — day-to-day accounts role. Records donations, submits expenses, runs reports for the tenant.

External auditors get a scoped, time-boxed, read-only view through a separate grant. See the Roles & permissions and Platform Admin chapters for the full capability matrix.

The next chapter walks you through signing in for the first time and enrolling MFA.