Accounting firms and their clients. One platform, live.
Building a platform where your customers have customers of their own? Octrotus set out to give accounting firms one place to collect, chase and sign their clients' documents. We owned the delivery of DocuFin all the way to production.
At a glance
- 01
Client. A South African software company.
- 02
Industry. Technology & SaaS, built for accounting firms.
- 03
Delivered. Takeover of a part-built platform, go-live and build-out.
- 04
Duration. Ten months, more than 20 sprints.
- 05
Team. A small Codehesion team, with a clear owner.
A platform three levels deep
The platform lets accounting firms collect documents from their clients, see what's still outstanding, and get it signed. It has layers: the platform itself, each accounting firm and its team, and each firm's own clients in a portal of their own.
A previous team had already built a good part of it. The business wanted more development capacity, and an experienced partner to help guide how the rest would be built.
The job was to pick up the work and get it to the firms.
We owned the delivery from the first sprint
They came to us for more hands. But a platform this layered needs one team answerable for all of it, so we took ownership of the whole delivery: the board, the sprint rhythm, code review, testing and every release.
We didn't stop to tidy up first. The product had to keep moving, so we worked through the inherited code in the same sprints as the new features.
One team answerable for all of it, from the code we inherited to the version in production.
How we built it
The engineering had two jobs at once: picking up code someone else had written, and getting a layered platform right for everyone on it. A few principles held from start to finish.
Picking up code we didn't write
We started by learning what was already built and why it was built that way. We kept what fitted where the platform was going and reworked the rest as we went, each change tested before it reached production. Nothing waited for a big clean-up, so new work never stalled behind old work.
Every level gets the right answer
With three levels in one platform, everything has to land correctly for each of them. We designed for that from the start and tested every piece of work against all three, so a change made for one level never surprises another.
Access designed in
Every person on the platform works with the permissions their role needs, and access was tested with every release.
Security built into the design
The platform holds documents that matter to the firms and the people they work for, so security was part of the design from day one, never a check left for the end.
Every release tested before it goes out
Every change went through code review, and a QA specialist tested each release before it reached production. Every environment is built the same way every time. New work landed on a platform firms were already using, so each release had to leave everything around it working.
A small team with a clear owner
Developers did the build, an experienced project manager kept the business close to every decision, and dedicated QA guarded each release. Experienced engineers from across Codehesion reviewed the work, so a small team carried the judgement of a much bigger one.
In use by firms and the people they work for
Accounting firms run their client work on the platform today, and their clients work with them through it. A new firm can get itself up and running without waiting on anyone.
The chase for paperwork now runs in one place, from the first request to the signed document.
A second developer, at their request
They started with one developer. Partway through, they asked for a second, and we kept building with them on a platform that was already live.
Keep going
Picking up someone else's platform? However many levels deep it goes, we'll take it live.
Tell us about a project like this.