Constant development and functionality buildup is the key to the successful existence of any automation system. Our project management platform fdForge is not an exception. Keep in mind that fdForge has been developed by Fresh Design Agency team for 6 years already and more than 30 stable versions of the system have been released for product use, each of them extends and supplements functionality of the previous one. Previously we limited ourselves to just a record in the system in the section “History of versions“ with a list of the functionality included in the version and immediately started working on the next version, but we realized that this kind of information might be interesting not only to our current customers, so we decided that starting with the latest version of the system we will share the details of its creation and tell about the developed functionality in a bit more detail.
For now, the latest major release of the system is version number 1.29.0, which took about 9 months to develop, from the beginning of describing the mechanics of working with the business analysis phase to the first version release.
Throughout fdForge's history, we've launched a multitude of projects in different business verticals. But almost all of those projects had one thing in common, they were either supposed to generate profits, or help solve certain “pain“ of our customers (time savings, control over execution, accounting for leftovers, etc.). If we consider the first category of projects - almost all of them have integration with one or more payment systems. That means that they deal with the money and personal data of users. Such projects need special control over the movement of finances, both for the security of transactions and the predictability of future earnings. Of course, our customers could get all of this data by downloading reports from various systems and merging them into one, but it causes a lot of inconveniences, increases the potential for errors in calculations, and generally violates the very idea of automation.
The financial module of the fdForge platform is designed to record information about the cash flow of each participant in the business process of a specific project. The functionality of this module allows you to do accounting in the form of analytics on accounts and financial documents on the basis of transactions recorded in the system.
In addition, the system lets you see what's coming in, what's going out, what's going in, and all of that stuff broken down by customer, partner, account, or transaction. For example, the system has the ability to break down transactions into different accounts based on their purpose or the currency of the transaction. Based on the data on receipts and payments, the financial module of the system is able to calculate the balance of each account, builds graphs of dynamics on the basis of data on cash flows.
Financial module features:
User accounts refer to users' internal system wallets. As mentioned above, accounts are created automatically depending on the business process of a particular project. One account is tied to only one currency, but there is no limit on the number of accounts per user. The system provides the ability to enable crediting for certain accounts, i.e., finding a negative balance on them.
In a user card, you can see a list of all his or her accounts, each account balance, the dynamics of charges/discharges to that account, his or her recent transactions, and the current balance of all user accounts in one currency. Adding this information to the user card makes it more comprehensive and informative, allowing the administrator to better process leads.
Each account has a separate page in the system, where you can see complete information about the account, its balance, total inflows and outflows, accrual trends, and popular correspondent accounts (these are the accounts that have had the most frequent transactions). In addition, you can view a list of all transactions conducted on the selected account and basic statistics on them, such as the total number of transactions, the average amount per transaction, and the number of unique correspondent accounts.
Transactions refer to all financial transactions that take place within the system (transfers from one account to another, deposits, withdrawals, etc.).
The majority of transactions will be generated automatically and depend on the business processes of the specific project, but the system also allows for manual creation of transactions. However, manual creation is only available if you have the privileges to do so. The automatic creation of transactions is most often tied to the responses of the payment systems integrated into the project.
To make sure there are no stale transactions in the system, each transaction has a specific lifetime, which is set and configurable for a specific project. This lifetime means the amount of time in which a transaction has to be closed, either positively or negatively, since it was created. If the transaction is not closed within the allotted time, it will automatically be cancelled by the system.
For your convenience, the accounting department has a separate section where you can view a list of all the transactions set up on your project in a single location with search and filtering capabilities based on various parameters. Each of the transactions has a separate page in the system where full information on this transaction is presented - its current status, amount, and data of accounts between which the current transaction was made.
Since the fdForge platform supports multicurrency, the financial module can convert amounts from one currency to another using a rate on a specific date, based on the cross-rates of currency stored in the system.
All cross-currency conversion rates are updated automatically. Admins have the ability to both view the rate on a specific date and use that rate when entering past transactions into the system manually.
Financial analytics are provided in the system in terms of specific entities - users, transactions, transactions, accounts. The main advantage of this approach is that transactions are not just postings capturing the fact of crediting/cancellation of funds from one account to another, but are attached to transactions between users, thus confirming the transaction and fully participating in the business process of the project.
This type of analytics is critical for business and marketing leadership to predict future earnings, adjust business goals, and execute marketing campaigns.
While the finance module was recently released on October 9, 2020, many of our customers have already upgraded to the system and seen its benefits.
A couple of examples of how we use the finance module beyond its original purpose of capturing and storing all of a project's financial transactions are just a few examples.
Usage options:
The main achievements of the implementation of the financial module in the fdForge platform are as follows:
After the already implemented financial module is tested for some time, we'll collect customer feedback, conduct our own internal analytics, and highlight the main objectives and plans for its future development. Currently, we're in an initial production run of the module; we're collecting feedback from our customers to make decisions on the implementation of the new functionality.
In future releases, we plan to include useful features such as:
Our financial module can easily be described as “financial accounting with a human face” Instead of complicated documents and .xlsx files, the meaning of which can only be understood by accountants, the fdForge platform provides the user with a simple and clear picture of the project's financial flows. So the most important feature of the finance module is its visibility.
While the finance module is primarily a control tool for business management, the module's results are more effective interaction with customers and faster order processing for managers. The reason is simple – the status of all payments in the system is strictly tracked and available to the administrator at all times.
In the future, we'll try to keep you up to date with important updates to the platform, and we hope this article was helpful as a review of the new module and an understanding of the benefits of its functionality