Increasing efficiency in finance through automation and cloud development

The client’s property tax calculation services that they provided to customers were mostly completed manually with the help of Excel sheets. As their business grew and the number of customers increased, these calculations started to incur substantial amounts of time and effort. Therefore, the company needed to automate this process to maintain their efficiency and keep up with the growth.

N-iX team has developed a Property Tax module and integrated it with the external information tax system that was used by the client. The module allows users to easily generate an Excel document that calculates property tax and other values based on predefined rules. The calculation results are uploaded into a single document that contains property price, rental income, and other details about the property valuation. Users can also generate PDF documents out of Excel, view data in PDF format, and monitor the data via a web UI.

Additionally, our engineers have developed a feature that allows users to generate property valuations in bulk for real estate objects within any US county. Approximately 300-3000 messages are generated in Azure Storage, pushed into a queue, and processed in the background. This feature significantly increases the speed of tax analysis and allows users to focus on other tasks until processing is complete.

To facilitate the onboarding process for users, we developed a single sign-on into the client’s system and the Property Tax module. We have used Redis to decrease the number of authorization requests, as it allows caching the data to avoid receiving a token every time a user logs in.

Furthermore, with the help of Azure Functions, Kubernetes, and the KEDA framework, we enabled the module to run seamlessly in any cloud environment, i.e. made it cloud-agnostic.

Also, N-iX has developed a UI/UX design for the Property Tax module. We created high-fidelity wireframes based on previously created sketches and passed them on for further development. We have also added multiple useful features, such as asynchronous notifications, upload of Excel and PDF documents, and a drag-and-drop preview of PDF reports.

Lastly, our engineers have set up a CI/CD pipeline from scratch, which accelerated the release cycle. We have also set up a code repository and manual testing, as well as the development and deployment processes based on the Agile methodology.

Our engineers have continuously gathered feedback from the client’s analysts and used it to improve the module even further.

N-iX has developed a module for the client’s tax platform that automates property tax calculation. It automatically retrieves data from the platform, fills in Excel tables, and enables platform users to generate reports and convert them to PDF format. We have also added several useful features to enhance the functionality of the module even further. This has helped the client gain several substantial benefits, such as:

• Accelerated tax calculations and reduced operational costs by automating manual processes involved in property tax calculation;
• Streamlined user experience with the tax platform by implementing automatic PDF report generation from Excel sheets;
• Increased the speed of tax analysis by implementing bulk processing for all real estate objects within any US county;
• Reduced time-to-market by setting up a CI/CD pipeline, Infrastructure as Code, and Agile methodologies from scratch.