Kheti Hisab — Offline Farm Accounting App for Indian Farmers

The challenge

Indian farmers — especially in Gujarat — keep most of their farm finances in paper diaries or spread across WhatsApp messages and verbal agreements. Existing accounting apps assume an English-speaking, always-online user with a stable bank account. They don't work for a farmer in a 2G coverage area who needs to log a ₹1,200 fertilizer expense in Gujarati on a phone with 4 GB of RAM.

Kheti Hisab was built to fix this: a phone-first ledger that treats offline as the default, the local language as the primary interface, and the user's own Google Drive as the backup destination — so no farmer data ever sits on our servers.

What we built

• Crop-wise P&L: log sales and expenses against a specific crop and season so the profit per acre is obvious at a glance.
• Multi-season tracking: support for parallel seasons (e.g. two wheat crops in the same calendar period) with full-date tabs that disambiguate collisions automatically.
• Pending money: separate buckets for "buyers who owe you" and "vendors you owe" with one-tap settlement.
• 11 languages: Gujarati, Hindi, English as priority locales plus 8 beta locales (Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia). Language is picked on first launch before any farming-year setup.
• Photo attachments: attach a bill or invoice photo to any transaction.
• Google Drive backup: sign in once, then back up the entire database + every attached photo to a private Drive folder. Restore on any device with one tap.
• Daily auto-backup: opt-in silent backup on app launch with a visible "Backing up to Drive…" indicator — no background service, no battery drain.
• Offline-first: the entire app works without a network. Drive sync is the only feature that needs internet, and it's optional.

How it works

1. Local SQLite + Drizzle ORM

All farm data lives in an on-device SQLite database accessed through Drizzle ORM. Idempotent migrations run on every launch so the schema upgrades cleanly even when users skip updates. There is no backend database — the user's phone is the source of truth.

2. Backup format

A single .kheti.zip file contains:

• database.db — the full SQLite snapshot
• media/ — every photo referenced by any transaction or crop
• manifest.json — original URI ↔ archive path mapping so URIs get rewritten correctly on restore

Backups are uploaded to Google Drive's drive.appdata scope — a hidden per-app folder the user can't accidentally delete from drive.google.com. Same pattern WhatsApp uses for its chat backups.

3. Restore round-trip

Tap a backup in the picker → it's downloaded → the SQLite file is swapped in atomically → photos are extracted to the new install's documents folder → photo URIs in the DB are rewritten to point at the new paths → the app reloads with the restored state. The whole thing takes a few seconds on a 7 KB backup with photos.

4. Auto-backup without a background service

Rather than fighting Android Doze and iOS BGTaskScheduler — both of which silently skip background jobs at the OS's discretion — Kheti Hisab runs the backup on app launch if the last successful backup is older than the chosen window (Daily or Weekly). Real-world reliability is >95% because most farmers open the app at least once a day. A visible spinner reassures users the upload is happening.

Tech stack

• Mobile: Expo SDK 54, React Native 0.81, expo-router file-based navigation
• Storage: expo-sqlite with Drizzle ORM, JSZip for backup packaging
• Auth + backup: @react-native-google-signin/google-signin, Google Drive REST API v3 (drive.appdata scope)
• Observability: @react-native-firebase/app + Crashlytics, Sentry
• i18n: i18next with priority/beta locale split
• Build & release: EAS Build, EAS Submit, Expo Updates for OTA

Outcome

• Backup feature shipped with full attachment round-trip + daily auto-backup in a single release.
• 11 locales available from day one — no farmer is forced into a language they don't read.
• Zero backend infrastructure to maintain: user data lives only on the device and in the user's own Drive.
• Average backup size: under 10 KB for a season's worth of activity, scaling linearly with attached photos.

What's next

• Category Expense Breakdown and Pending Receivables reports (PDF export, share via WhatsApp).
• Annual Farm P&L for KCC loan applications.
• iOS release (currently Android-only beta).