Child Care Subsidy Solution

Project Overview

First Financial Associates have been looking to build a system that allows them to manage and administer various child card subsidy programs on behalf of their clients. The system would be used in the company intranet and provides a number of management features for managing their processes.

The system would allow the users to manage their clients (companies or agencies) along with their employees and children, at the core of the business cycle, we have the subsidy type which determines the support/sponsoring model that each company uses, there are various subsidy types involved like fixed amount per child, flat amount per month, percent of total child care charges and others.

Each company has its own sponsoring model and thus the application will need to be flexible to support different models to fit the customer base.

Once these settings are in place, the system would manage both monthly invoices and payments paid to the child card providers. In addition, the system needs to include a native mail merge function for building out emails that are sent to customers on various events like requiring certification papers which involves maintaining a list of required documents for each employee including income tax returns, statements of earnings and leave among others.

Finally, the system needs to include a large set of management reports like monthly reports, year to date, yearend, 1099 reports and others.

Challenges

1. The majority of the system users are not computer experts thus an easy to use interface is a major requirement.
2. Smart data validation is a critical need due to the financial nature of the application.
3. InspirationGate developed a custom test automation tool to make sure that the entire application scenarios are tested every time we do a change in the code.

Provided Solution

InspirationGate has been developing data management solutions for a long time and over the years, it has built a base platform for building these kinds of solutions in a time and cost effective manner.

The data management framework consists of a number of backend components and .NET designer components that aid in designing the user interface, enforcing various kinds of validation rules, binding and managing data, helping developers using various Visual Studio extensions, among others.

We have built a desktop .NET Windows Forms based on our data management framework to cover the system requirements, complemented with automated unit testing techniques, Crystal Reports for the reporting and Microsoft Word interop for mail merge functionality, we were able to build an end to end working solution in a matter of weeks.

Technologies

Visual Studio 2005, .NET Framework 2.0, C#, SQL Server 2005.

Customer Feedback

"InspirationGate helped us create a software program that has far exceeded our expectations. The program has vastly increased our overall productivity and efficiency and helped us administer, organize and automate all of our clients information. They were able to include all of the features in the software program that we had envisioned and requested, plus recommend and include some additional features that we had not thought about. InspirationGate have been invaluable assets and we are looking forward to continue working with them."

- Bob Murphy, President
First Financial Associates, Inc.