Case Story: Finazilla - Modern & Advanced Budgeting Solution
The Finazilla is a Jyväskylä-based (Finland) SaaS company that specializes in advanced budgeting solutions. I had the pleasure to work with them from January 2018 through until June 2019. Now is the perfect time to recap what we were able to achieve together during this time.
Introduction to Finazilla & budgeting
I think most of us have done budgeting in our personal life. Take a holiday or a day trip as an example: you need to do a bit planning when booking flights or accommodation. Or in everyday life, maybe you do a daily budget in order to avoid personal bankruptcy.
An individual can do this planning on a spreadsheet or in one of the numerous personal budget apps.
When it comes to a professional tool such as Finazilla, which is used by finance professionals (CFOs, controllers, accountants, etc.), the requirements and the amount of data that has to be handled is at a whole different magnitude, with much more complex calculations.
An example might be a restaurant chain that has multiple locations. Each location has its own personnel, products, expenses, etc.
A concept of dimension can be used to look at the same data from different angles. Here are few examples of what the dimension can be: the cost center (a department within a business to which costs can be allocated), a project, location, employee, etc.
The user can make use of formulas, rules, and transfers that affect not only a specific row but which can also alter other rows.
My part in the project
I undertook the full-stack development on a stack that consisted of a modern React front-end and backend written in C#. The application is hosted on Azure and uses many of the Azure services.
Even though I have contributed to many different views and aspects of the application, there are several areas to which I gave greater attention:
- The frontpage of the Finazilla, which included custom dashboard and widget system
- Note-taking support
- The share functionality for dashboards and reports
- The cash flow (short term forecast) backend
- Theming support for the front page
Other programming tasks were related to the visualizations, integrations, performance optimization and (end-to-end) testing.
I was further involved in improving the development and testing processes, while gathering the requirements from the business team and designing the solution with the development team all comprised part of the project work.
Conclusion
Even though I worked remotely most of the time, the collaboration has been very smooth thanks to the very professional Finazilla team with whom I had the privilege to work on a daily basis. The communication was done in Slack via text or video chat when needed.
I have received very positive feedback from the client, which is the biggest motivator for me in providing professional services to clients.
I think we achieved the build features that will definitely make Finazilla users very happy. Finazilla has received positive feedback and they have testimonial videos (in Finnish) from satisfied clients. Go check them out on their YouTube channel.
Most of the main features have been now built, so we mutually agreed that now is a good time for them to continue on their own.
Big thanks to the whole team for making this journey pleasant and good learning experience.