The Need for Accounting Information System to Facilitate Partnership Contracts in Islamic Microfinance Institutions: The Case of Baitul Maal wa Tamwil (BMT) in Indonesia

The development of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia showed a tendency has increased along with improvement of the national economy. Indonesia together with India and China are the three countries in the world who have the highest economic growth within the last 3 years. However, SMEs are still confronted with basic problems such as the limited access to the sources of financing from formal financial institutions, particularly from the banks. This problem causes them to rely on informal sources of financing. Currently, the informal financial institutions are more striking among SMEs because it is more flexible, for example in terms of requirements and the amount of loans that are not as tight as banking. This makes informal financing institutions increasingly popular among small and medium entrepreneurs. One of them that is quite close with SMEs is Islamic Microfinance Institutions or commonly known as Baitul Maal wa Tamwil (BMT). However, both the BMTs and SMEs have difficulties in cooperating each other mainly related to the mastery of information technology to improve efficiency in managing transactions under Shariah (islamic law)-based business contracts. Therefore, the authors urge that the need for accounting information systems to facilitate the contracts. This paper aims to discuss the urgency of drafting a framework for information systems for BMTs to support the operations of partnership contracts. This paper proposes the use of Open Source Software (OSS) as the basis for developing a system that is technically cheaper, more efficient and easy to implement.