Projects

Ruitenburg adviseurs & accountants / Ffort BV

Sector: Financial services
Size: 100+
Web site: ruitenburg.nu / ffort.nl

This financial service company from Maassluis, the Netherlands was looking for ways to improve and optimize their service and processes. Many often recurring processes were done by hand. Communication took place by telephone, or by traditional mail. Systems and applications were not compatible and not connected to each other. How could they improve this?

They asked 23G for help, my then employer. It was my first project there. An intensive design sprint in which all requirements and business processes were given attention, resulted in a design and a list of epics and user stories. My responsibility was building the complete backend and integrations with various systems and applications.

The Epics

A chat interface, where customers can communicate easily with their consultants, and share documents and other files
A financial dashboard, with real time insights
A document management system providing an automated flow for approval and submission of financial statements and declarations

Architecture

We chose Laravel as back end for the project, running on the AWS EC2 platform, with a managed RDS (MySQL) database and S3 file storage. The front end would be made using the VueJS framework.

The chat interface

To centralize communication, and to make it auditable and searchable, we built a chat providing customers with their own chat channel with their consultants and accountants. I implemented the real time aspect of the interface using Laravel Broadcast combined with pusher.com. The chat also provided a module to share files, which were encrypted and saved in AWS S3 buckets.

Financial insights

Customers wanted an extensive and up to date overview of their financial situation, without having to log into an overly complicated accounting software. So we developed an user friendly financial dashboard. All data would be provided by the API of various financial packages like Exact Online and Visma.

This turned out to be a quite challenging task. Of course the data shown in the dashboard must be 100% correct and up to date. But performance was also very important. On top of that, the design included advanced filtering and benchmark options, in some cases even features not provided in the source data.

I did not have deep knowledge of accounting, so I needed the assistance of some accountants to find my way through the often quite complex theory. Thankfully I worked with an excellent team and together we finished the job with success and the client was very happy with the results. All in all it was one of the most challenging and educating projects I have ever done.

Document management system

At Ruitenburg, the creation of things like yearly financial statements and tax declaration used to go by traditional mail, making it an inefficient and time consuming process. We managed to automate this by building a document flow system which included an automated review and approval flow, and automatic submission to the Chamber of Commerce and the tax office. Every event of the flow was saved in an audit log.

Adoption and further developments

After realization of above epics, the application has been introduced company wide. Soon it played a central role within the organization. Based on user feedback we added new functionality, like integrations with AFAS and Unit4; a module to automatically generate yearly statements based on audit files; and various CRM functions.

Project: Ffort