SIM — Integrated Municipal System

The institution

The Municipality of Morona, in Macas, Ecuador, ran much of its work as manual processes, alongside a few systems that didn't talk to each other. Each area — finance, human resources, the property registry, drinking water, the cadastre, the procedures citizens start online — had its own documents, its own approvals and its own data.

SIM, the Integrated Municipal System, brought those processes together into one system with one database. I worked on it from 2019 to 2021: first as a developer, then leading a team of three. I'm one of the two main contributors to its repository.

What it does

• Finance: accounting, budgets and purchasing, with a warehouse and fixed assets.
• Human resources: employees, payroll and absences, with attendance read directly from the biometric clocks over the network.
• Services to citizens: the property registry, drinking water, taxpayers and procedures that can be started online.

The result: the institution's data lived in one place, and repetitive tasks were automated.

How it's built

• One Django project, an app per area, sharing the institution's core records — employees, taxpayers, departments. Django REST Framework exposes the same models as an API.
• Procedures as state machines. A procedure, a registry entry or an accounting document moves through explicit states and transitions (django-fsm): each step is a named transition, not an edited field.
• Background work with Celery, for what shouldn't keep a user waiting.
• Shared building blocks. The admin layer and the auditing of model changes come from two packages of mine, django-superadmin and django-tracing, published on PyPI; the versions SIM uses are maintained under the municipality's group.
• Delivery with GitLab CI: the staging and release branches build a Docker image, push it to the registry and roll it out over SSH.