Q3 Technologies developed a Web-based financial application that helped users in budgeting. The Application had several modules by which users could control the budget allocated to them. It could be a cost center or country, a product or a brand of their company or any project or activity under their control. In this way, it was possible to control the financial resources of the company.

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Company Profile

The client is a large Software Development and IT Services company based in Costa Rica and services the Latin American market.

Business Situation

The company wanted to develop an application that could keep track of the company's budget, so it could make the most of it's resources. There was a need to bring in a process of authorization through which purchase requests could be controlled and approvals could be done against the set budget, irrespective of the location of the person who was approving the expense. The system also needed to allow a pre-defined process of authorization in order to automate the processes required in providing an approval for purchases, projects, or other budget items.

The client required a 6 module application which should integrate with their existing application and should be capable of performing the following functions:

• Integration of the accounting system with the budgeting system and permit the registration and retrieval of accounting information based on double entry principle of accounting records, using generally accepted accounting principles.
• The system automatically calculates the income tax to each bill with an option to be changed by the user.
• Automatic calculations to define the next budget period and allow the daily updating of currency exchange rates.
• The system must be integrated with the accounting module to affect corresponding accounting accounts.
• The user information must be considered.
• The system must allow access to and use of multiple concurrent users by ensuring security and data integrity and acceptable performance.

Challenges

• Allowing the integration of the existing application to be done at the database level, in the absence of an API.
• To understand the flow and functionalities from specifications provided to develop the new modules.
• Language was a barrier since the documentation was in Spanish.

Technical Solution

Q3 developed The Financial Enhancement application as a web-based application which could be deployed on IIS Server. This web application was driven by a backend including the database which was shared with the client's existing Financial application. The system used an n-tier, highly scalable, modular and easy to maintain .Net architecture consisting the following layers: Presentation Layer, Business Layer and Data Layer.

• The Presentation/UI Layer was responsible for handling requests from the client/browser, and generating dynamic HTML content using ASP.Net pages on the server.
• The Business layer, which was implemented in C#, contained the core business logic, domain model and integration endpoints of the application.

The Data Layer was used to store and retrieve data by encapsulating the database technology used and the mechanism to communicate with the database.

Technology Used

The following technologies were used for developing the solution:

Architectural Component	Technology/Framework
Language	C#
Client Tier	AJAX Javascript HTML
Presentation Tier	ASP.Net Teleric Controls or Infragistics NetAdvantage Web Suite
Batch Framework	.NET Framework 3.5
Reporting	Teleric or Seagate Crystal Report
Common Services	CSLA Framework
Data Tier	SQL Server 2005
Tools	MS Visual Studio Team Edition 2008 VSS Version Control