Our Work: Food Brokerage Accounting System

As a broker between food suppliers and distributors, the client’s processes and requirements had evolved over time, but their accounting application wasn’t designed to accommodate these changes. For example, the existing system only tracked transactions at the invoice level. However, each invoice could include multiple products, each of which is subject to different contract rules.

To manage hundreds of suppliers and contracts and more than 100,000 products, the accountants had created multi-step, semi-manual workarounds using Excel spreadsheets and lookup tables.

The client needed a new accounting system that supported their processes and could be easily enhanced to meet future needs and increased data volumes.

The Solution

Resource Data built a custom accounting and invoicing system that manages our client’s suppliers, distributors, products, and contracts in a centralized database.

The application tracks each product included on an invoice and verifies each against applicable contract rules. With this detailed data, our client also has very detailed reporting. For example, they can now easily see how well a product is selling, which is critical for contract negotiations.

By automating formerly manual tasks, the new system has also greatly increased efficiency.

Our Approach

We used a Scrum methodology to gather business requirements and develop the accounting system. This iterative process, in which key client stakeholders were heavily involved, enabled us to be extremely responsive to our client’s needs and feedback.

When we designed the application and database, we kept performance, scalability, and extensibility as key considerations. By doing so, we developed an application that supports our client’s current needs and that will support future growth and changes.

With the application’s complex business rules, testing was an important project component. For each release, we performed extensive testing, including comprehensive regression testing. In addition, our client completed our user acceptance testing process, which focused on validating the application met the business requirements.