Case Study: Financial Management Solution For European Union Projects

Client: CERS – product company developing managing services for cultural organisations

Business goals: Creation and delivery of a SaaS solution for efficient financial management of EU projects

Product: Ruby-based Web product for budgeting, accounting, and reporting; fully compliant with the Creative Europe programme standards

Applied technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails 4, Trailblazer, Sidekiq, Vue.js, XLS parsing/generation, PostgreSQL, Ansible (automated server deployment), DigitalOcean cloud, SendinBlue (mailing service), Material Design, prototyping, manual testing, Agile management framework

Designing a solution that is compliant with the EU standards

Replacement of conventional means of financial management and reporting—and full automation of these operations—such was the goal. The product was designed for a specific niche – people who receive grants for cooperation projects for Creative Europe. Its key features include:

• Import of budgets with costs and incomes per partner
• Real-time overview of budgets, expenditures, incomes, and activities
• Approval of expenditures
• Secure cloud data storage
• Reporting system that exports data into official EU documents

Implementation and delivery of a Ruby-based product

Ruby was selected as the basis for the solution. Most importantly, it would help us deal with our strict time constraints and meet the deadlines as set by the clients. Additionally, it allowed us to use a number of web application development best practices that helped us write the entire logic much faster, make the code stable, and use the Ruby/Ruby on Rails development stack for both front and back end.

Initially, the clients provided us with raw wireframes—and our designed used them to create a clickable prototype with all logical links of the whole system. Material Design was used for visualization of all forms as a standardized set of components.

Vue.js allowed us to create rich JavaScript GUI and at the same time avoid all potential issues of building an SPA. The front end became able to support complex interactions within a single screen.

Secure cloud solution with multi-tenant access management. The system distributes access on the application level and tracks the change history.

A few words from the Clients

"Highly professional collaboration for the development of a very specific software solution. The reactions received by our users show that MobiDev did an excellent work here."

Roger Christmann, Founder & CEO
Thomas Kulke, Founder

Product launch and evolution with 20 new adopters over 6 months

The product was implemented and launched in accordance with the clients' plans—and their own business became its first adopter. We proceeded with further evolution and customization of the product for 20 new adopters over the next 6 months.

The client has scheduled a visit to our development center to meet the team members in person and discuss plans for the near future—which include presentation of CERS as a standard recommended solution for Creative Europe projects.