Outsourcing Consulting News
Tax Advisory Portal for Financial Company, USA
Customer
Our customer, a fast growing Tax Advisory company, assists its clients in understanding the changing landscape of the tax advisory field. The customer helps its clients attract, serve and retain customers successfully with timely, actionable insights into tax changes, price plans, tax planning. The purpose of the customer solution is to provide Internet-based financial portals and software subscription services to estate planners and financial planners, allowing them to manage their clients' needs and better educate their clients regarding the techniques they wish them to implement.
Customer business needs
The main idea of this project was to create an enterprise portal designed for practitioners in the area of estate planning. This site enables subscribers to illustrate very complicated estate planning ideas and techniques ("Methods") to their clients in an understandable manner.
- These Methods are illustrated with the use of complex Excel spreadsheets along with associated Flash presentations, Flash elements and graphics. These Methods are be customizable to each user and client.
- As tax laws change, the appropriate data has to be quickly and easily changed without disrupting the entire operation.
- The basic data flow produces data and Presentations available for dynamic reporting via the customer internet portal as well as interactive reporting using excel processing in Flash Presentations.
Solution
- SoloSoft has developed and deployed a scalable, extensible architecture that warrants minimal change to architectural frameworks and technologies with corresponding growth in user base.
- The presentation layer created using Web Services XML/XSLT technology
- All the calculations information is placed into the database together with calculation techniques. The Flash Presentation acquires this information and use it for displaying purposes. If user changes a name or calculation in input field - the name and/or the calculation result would change in Flash Presentation. Web Services technology - XML/XSLT is used in passing data from Excel calculation formulas to the Flash
- Recurring billing module was developed under SSL protected environment.
- Since this is a subscription-based service there is ability to create user accounts, accept online payment and keep the user records.
- For a fee, there is certain access to the techniques on customer reporting portal, and a trial demo period with limited functionality implemented.
Benefits
As a result of the solution, the customer company is able to use Application Service Provider model using .NET technology. The customer got a solution to reach out to their clients with highly personalized content, allowing tax consultants on the go to dramatically boost productivity and most importantly, to provide their customers with reports in a matter of seconds.
Tools and Technologies
Visual Studio.NET/ASPX/IIS 6.0/MS SQL 2000/Transact SQL, XML/XSLT, Flash