Zakat & Financial Aid Review Portal

Problem

Zakat and financial aid cases are sensitive, time-sensitive, and high-trust. The committee’s process relied on paper notes, email threads, and manual tracking. That made collaboration fragmented, decisions hard to trace, and disbursement tracking inconsistent. Reviewers could not see the same case state at the same time, questions lived in inboxes instead of being attached to the specific answers they referenced, and there was no single source of truth for case status, review completion, or final disposition.

Solution

I designed and am building a secure, end-to-end internal review portal tailored to a small committee. Applications are submitted via Tally and automatically become structured cases. The system runs an automated screening step immediately, applying policy rules and creating system-generated flags when criteria fail. Review happens in a shared real-time case view where multiple reviewers can work simultaneously, attach yellow or red flags directly to specific answers, and mark their review complete. Cases flow through clear stages (Review, Interview, Decision, Disbursement, Closed) with explicit decision semantics and a clean disbursement record, replacing email chains with an auditable workflow.

Outcomes

• Replaces manual email and paper tracking with a single live case system
• Enables real-time collaborative review with structured flag semantics
• Creates an auditable record of review, decision, and disbursement
• Reduces cognitive load with a single report-style case page and status-driven controls

Technical decisions

• Real-time collaboration via WebSockets so reviewers see flags and updates instantly
• Strict flag semantics: yellow for clarification, red for potential grounds for denial; system can generate non-ignorable red flags during screening
• Immutable storage of raw Tally submission JSON; review annotations layered separately so the form can evolve safely
• Django for workflow modeling and authorization, Django Channels for live updates, Postgres for persistence, Redis as the channel layer
• Docker Compose for orchestration; Caddy for automatic HTTPS; hosted on a dedicated always-on machine via WSL

Next phase

Add refined reviewer ergonomics (role-based shortcuts, stronger stage gating), and finalize production hardening: access control review, audit logging improvements, and backup/restore procedures.