Kisti collection is the part of a Bangladeshi development business that decides whether construction continues on time. A project can be fully sold and still stop work, because sold is not collected. The job is to build a schedule the buyer can actually meet, chase it with a fixed sequence rather than personal energy, and see the overdue position early enough to act on it — ideally two months before it becomes a cash problem.
Start from the construction curve, not the competition
The mistake that creates most collection stress is designing the payment plan in the sales meeting. A payment plan is a financing decision. Build it backwards:
- Lay out the construction spend month by month for the project.
- Lay out the collection the plan would produce, assuming a realistic sales velocity — not the optimistic one.
- Look at the gap. That gap is what you are financing, out of equity or bank borrowing.
A plan that closes 20 percent more units but front-loads nothing will widen that gap. This is the same arithmetic covered in developer cash flow, and it is worth doing before a single price list is printed.
A worked schedule
Take a 1,250 sq ft flat in Mirpur at BDT 8,500 per sq ft, so BDT 1,06,25,000, on a three-year project.
| Component | Basis | Amount (BDT) | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking money | Fixed | 3,00,000 | On booking form |
| Down payment | 20% less booking money | 18,25,000 | Within 30 days of agreement |
| Monthly kisti | 48 months | 1,25,000 | Month 1 to 48 |
| Milestone: roof casting | 5% | 5,31,250 | On certified completion |
| Milestone: handover | Balance | 19,68,750 | Before registration |
Two things matter more than the exact numbers. First, every row is a rule, not a typed value — change the price and every row recomputes. Second, the two milestone rows are tied to a certified event, which means the certification has to exist as a record. See milestone billing for how that certification is produced.
Chasing, as a fixed sequence
The strongest predictor of collection performance is not how good your collection officer is. It is whether the same sequence happens to every buyer without anybody deciding to start it.
| When | Action | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| 5 days before due | Reminder with amount and reference | SMS or WhatsApp template |
| Due date | Payment link and account details | |
| Day 3 overdue | Short reminder, no pressure | |
| Day 10 | Call from collection officer, outcome logged | Phone |
| Day 21 | Formal letter, late fee applied if the agreement allows | Email and post |
| Day 45 | Manager call, restructure offered | Phone |
| Day 90 | Notice of default under the agreement | Formal |
The point of writing it down is that steps one to three cost nothing per buyer once automated, and they remove roughly half the cases that would otherwise reach day 21. WhatsApp reminder templates covers the approval rules that make that automation compliant.
The three reports that matter
Most developers have too many reports and not enough of these three:
- Due this month, collected, gap. One line per project, refreshed daily. If it is a monthly report, you are always looking at a problem that started five weeks ago.
- Ageing. Overdue amounts bucketed 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, 90+ days. The shape tells you whether you have a follow-up problem, a buyer-quality problem, or a construction-confidence problem.
- Buyer ledger. Every charge, every receipt, every adjustment for one buyer, printable. This ends most disputes in one page.
Payment channels and the reconciliation trap
Bangladeshi buyers pay by bKash, Nagad, bank transfer, cheque and cash at site. Each channel arrives differently, and a system that only understands bank deposits pushes the other four back into a spreadsheet. Three rules keep reconciliation sane:
- Every receipt records the channel and the reference — a TrxID, a cheque number, a deposit slip number.
- Partial payments are allowed and allocated oldest-installment-first, automatically.
- Excess payments create a credit on the buyer ledger rather than being adjusted mentally.
Reconciling bKash, Nagad, bank and cash goes through the matching logic in detail.
Seeing default before it happens
Buyers rarely stop paying suddenly. They pay a little late, then a little short, then stop answering. Those are recordable events, and a system that keeps them can rank your buyer list by risk. That gives a collection officer somewhere useful to spend their week instead of calling everyone. Six signals in your own data sets out which ones actually predict.
What to do next
Take one project's current kisti schedule, put your last three months of receipts against it, and look at the ageing buckets. If more than 15 percent of what was due is sitting past 30 days, the schedule and the follow-up sequence are worth an hour of attention — see what that looks like in a live system.