Financial services providers in Germany are rapidly working to update their financial management solutions. This is not a surprise, as technology and market trends are constantly changing, and companies need to stay competitive. According to a BITKOM survey in 2019, 70% of financial services providers in Germany are investing in digital technologies to improve their customer experience.
In 2018, a German company contacted Elinext to help them upgrade their financial management system. The cooperation is still ongoing, and the results have already satisfied the client and its customers. Let's learn more about the process and the results that followed.
The customer
The client is a provider of technical solutions for financial management for local municipalities and public and social communities across Germany.
Challenge
The client came in with a platform for financial management and accounting used by local municipalities and communities. The platform had been developed a long time ago and lacked some processes and functionality that customers were using on other platforms.
The project required us to fix the issues and upgrade the accounting module in order to make it more user-friendly, stable and faster.
Solution
The cooperation between the client and Elinext started in late 2018. Before that, the project had been in the hands of another vendor with experience in upgrading platforms. However, the client switched to Elinext thanks to our successful demo of QA capability, quick communication and selection of CVs. When the Elinext team joined the project, there was an existing structure for the future platform. Due to vast experience in the development, our team provided a range of UX/UI recommendations in order to improve user experience of a final product.
Our developers were responsible for upgrading the module used for inventory accounting and depreciation and created the following functionalities:
Assets
A submodule where a company can create an asset they purchased and fill in the following information: the type of asset, start date of use, the owner and budget of an asset, and details on depreciation.
Asset booking
A submodule for asset booking with ability to fill in the payment details, such as invoice date, pricing details, and a payment type (incoming, outgoing, depreciation, and others).
Calculation of depreciation
Calculation of depreciation is the main process inside the accounting module which shows the amount of money a company will have subtracted monthly. The Elinext team had improved the visualization of data and added a filtering feature.
Withdrawal
The withdrawal feature allows a company to easily withdraw assets by specifying the date and percentage from the initial cost. After that, the depreciation will be recalculated and presented in a table with new data.
Reports
The Elinext team was responsible for optimizing the reporting functionality. The older system could take as long as 10 minutes to load a report because each company has around 10,000 objects. Additionally, the reporting functionality lacked scalability — users could not add custom columns to see specific data.
Taking into account these issues, the team has introduced the flexible reporting functionality. Today, loading reports takes just a few seconds, as it operates at the database level. Besides that, users can choose what kind of data, and for which period they want to see it, in each report.
The Elinext team continues developing the report templates as they become more complex and more extensive.
Data importing
Data importing is what the team has been actively working on for the last year. Most customers of client companies still use the old version of the platform, which still retains a large amount of data. The goal of the Elinext team is to migrate the data to the new version of the platform while avoiding data loss.
Cost forecasting
The team also introduced the cost forecasting feature for objects. The system leverages the inflation forecast data provided by third-party companies. Based on this, it calculates the approximate cost of goods for the months and years to come.
Admin features
Elinext developed a range of admin features that each company can leverage in order to enhance the user experience of their customers.
Results
While the project is still ongoing, some of the client’s customers are already using the upgraded system. The team continues developing new functionality and migrating the platform to React. The Elinext team also works on the planning module in cooperation with another vendor.
Elinext has years of experience in building and upgrading fintech software solutions. Learn more about our expertise and contact us with your query on how we might help you achieve your software goals.
