Government & institutional
iPADS
The planning and budgeting system a provincial government runs its development programme on.
- Role
- Software engineer — backend, workflow engine and reporting
- Period
- 2025 — present
- Status
- In production
The problem
A provincial development programme is assembled from thousands of schemes moving through a fixed sequence of forms, committees and financial ceilings. Run on spreadsheets and paper files, the sequence is invisible: nobody can say where a scheme currently sits, which officer is holding it, whether a district has exhausted its ceiling, or how much of an approved release has actually been utilised. Every reconciliation is a manual one, and every answer is out of date by the time it is compiled.
The approach
iPADS models the real administrative process rather than replacing it. Each document type — concept paper, PC-1, PC-3, PCT-15 case, budget demand, re-appropriation, release — is a first-class entity with its own forwarding history, so a scheme's position is a stored fact rather than something reconstructed from emails. Ceilings, weightages and allocations are enforced by the system at the point of entry, which is what turns a policy rule into something that cannot quietly be broken. Every approval step writes an immutable history row, so the audit trail is a by-product of using the system, not a separate exercise.
What it does
ADP formulation and scheme lifecycle
Annual Development Programme formulation from sector and district ceilings down to the individual scheme, with import paths for existing ADP and SAP data, and archived revisions kept alongside live ones.
Document workflows with real forwarding history
Concept papers, PC-1s, PC-3s and PCT-15 cases each carry cost estimations, scope details, SDG mapping and a scrutiny checklist, and move between officers through configurable flow and action settings.
Financial control that binds
Departmental and district budget ceilings, district weightage, ceiling-shift and allocation-modification requests, excess-limit demands and re-appropriation of funds — each with its own approval chain and history.
Committees, agendas and minutes
Committee meetings, agendas, decisions, working papers, discussions and approved minutes are recorded in the system, so a decision is linked to the scheme it decided.
Releases, utilisation and physical progress
Federal and provincial releases, utilisation reporting and project physical progress are tracked against the same scheme record that was approved, which is what makes financial and physical progress comparable.
Outcome
In production inside government, with a mobile client release channel alongside the web application.
Access
iPADS is institutional software. The deployment is reachable at the link above, but the system itself is behind a sign-in and its data is not public — so this page describes the problem and the architecture, with no screenshots and no client-confidential detail.