Developing a finance system

davetherave2 · 4 Nov 2009 at 13:17

Right long story short I am looking to create an internal finance system for an application that I have.

Currently the application uses a third party product and the data is pushed to the package from our application.

Due to our current system being a bit outdated and having so many patches/ remedial work done to it the decision has been taken to design and redevelop the system.

Foolishly i suggested that we should build a finance system into the new system thinking it would be relatively easy but after consulting our finance department I have found it is more work than I was expecting.

The reason for doing this is that we could do a lot more work with our system and then push the data to a third party product/ number of third party products.

So are there any good resources that anyone can reccommend that would do the job. I have found one website that seems to give me a little bit of info but not enough to give me a full understanding of what i need and why i need it.

Thanks in advance for any help.

davetherave2 · 4 Nov 2009 at 17:50

thanks for the info.

Many of the points that you offered are things that i have already discussed with the finance team/ or are things we currently have with our existing third party package.

But boy did I underestimate the amount of work involve you mention a systems upgrade to finance people and they want everything plus the kitchen sink adding into the new system

I really should have kept my mouth shut on this one. Oh well I know it is going to be painful to start off with but at least in the long run I know that we will have a more flexible system with greater control.

davetherave2 · 4 Nov 2009 at 22:53

well I work for an smb of around 100 - 200 people. As mentioned we currently use a third party system which was put in place 5+ years ago and has never had any real updates from the vendor who supplied it to us.

We have recently had massive issues with the data not being stored correctly so have had to get them to fix the issues which is still an on going thing 1 month later.

The intention is that we have a two tier finance system. We have the finance system which is internal to our application which holds all the data and generates all the reports and invoices etc and then have a third party application like we currently have and export our data to it / cross reference the integerity of our data to ensure we are not making mistakes and eventually transfers all the funds.

I know this may sound overly complex but I am looking at this development as not only a milestone in my development career (this being my first development role although I have been developing professionally for 18 months I am at least 18 months behind where I should be) which has progressed slower than i had originally anticipated, but also something that will provide a better cleaner solution in the event we decide to change our main invoicing/accounting package.

The kinds of resources that I am looking for are the kinds that will aid me in understanding how a finance system should be constructed in theory and what are the potential pitfuls/ quick wins (if there are any) that will help me develop a solution that won't need to have major recoding due to VAT rates changing or handling special tax requirements etc.

The current technology that we use is all MS based so SQL 2005/ C#.

Plus time is of the essence with this. Now I know that this is not a quick job and I would consider 6 months a possible time frame to get a complete working solution but the powers that be want it delivered within 2 - 4 months which I just don't think it can be done, or if it is then it is going to be full of potential holes and issues.

Again thanks all for your help so far.

davetherave2 · 5 Nov 2009 at 17:11

Again guys thanks for the additional information.

I have already done some background work with the users with their current system which I am currently maintaining but it is a struggle as it was not documented and implemented by previous developers who have since left.

I have had a number of meetings with the finance team to see what they do/ what works/ doesn't work and what we can do to improve the overall system for them.

I am currently at the start of pooling all the resources together that I have got from these meetings and reviewing the exisiting solution to see how it works and seeing if anything can be recycled as it were to speed up development time but I don't think much of it will be very useful initially.

Again thanks for all the insight and hopefully I can pull this off somehow.