I just had an idea today at lunch.
According to NP10, we should be able to track down the donors who deposited money to kappiya who had failed to get the things for us after 6 verbal reminders.
Yet in practice, I don’t see people exchanging contact numbers.
But nowadays, most lay people have smart phones, and smartphones can scan, can transfer money, can do accounting on the spot.
So, might as well have an app. the app acknowledges whether one is the kappiya, the monastic (optional for those monastics who doesn’t uses smartphones), or the donors.
The donor who wishes to support the monastic just pull out the app, decide how much to donate, scan the kappiya’s QR code, then that amount of money is dedicated to the kappiya.
The kappiya once gotten an allowable need from the monastic, uses the funds in the app to purchase the item (if online, then integration with online payment apps, if offline, then insert the amount spent manually). The kappiya give the item to the monastic, who then tap received, whereby the kappiya’s account process the payment to allow for the donor’s money to be reimbursed to the kappiya. Or if the amount is too large for the kappiya to use their own money first, the monastic can pre-acknowledge receiving for the money to go through first.
This system would prevent kappiya from abusing the money, would allow donors who for some reason need the money back to decide to withdraw support at anytime, provided that their money is not used up already first to provide for the monastic.
In terms of whose money got used first, maybe there can be many systems, one system I think is intuitive and fair is first come first use.
So donor 1 donates 10, donor 2 donates 20, item was 15, used up all of donor 1’s money and 5 of donor 2’s money. Donor 2 if wishes to get back money can only get back 15. This is even if the kappiya has 1000 accumulated from many later donors.
The app also links which kappiya is serving which monastic, which donor gave to which kappiya in support for which monastic. And can even have an item restriction possibility of donor specify that this is only for bus ticket or something.
The donors who wishes to donate for general funds to maintain the monastery would need to be informed by the app of what the saṅgha donor funds can and cannot be used for so that they can go to the monastery’s office to support the monastery (and the staff of the monastery) if they choose to do so.
The app can also contain all sorts of tutorial on how to be a good kappiya, the relevant vinaya rules on money etc.
Anyone asked if they wanted to offer their technical service to develop apps for the benefit of Buddhism?
I think technical issues would be with international fund exchanges etc.
Also, any other system for how the donor’s money is used other than first come first use?