Convenient Customer Portal for Fast and Accessible Tax Consulting Services

About Our Client

The Client is a Texas-based company that helps its customers manage commercial and residential property taxes.

Challenge

The Client outgrew their ready-made web portal solution that allowed users to access their financial data. Legacy software would no longer meet their needs in terms of functionality and performance.

To attract new customers and sustain the loyalty of the existing ones, the Client needed to give them convenient and easy access to the financial information using a more flexible and speedy web customer portal.

Solution

The Client handed over the end-to-end development of the new web portal solution to ScienceSoft.

Since the Client didn’t have a clear vision of the future solution at the beginning of cooperation, ScienceSoft’s team decided to incorporate prototyping into the development process. The delivered solution prototype helped the Client comprehensively test the concept and resolve most initial uncertainties over the requirements.

ScienceSoft’s development team engineered a custom digital platform based on .NET Core and Azure Cloud Services (Application Services, SQL Database Services). Our .NET developers built and deployed both front-end and back-end software parts, as well as handled the required integrations and data synchronization of the portal with QuickBooks Desktop (an accounting software), SigerTax (a tax management system), and Merchant One (a payment system and credit card processor).

Database index optimization and specific design practices secured the required speed of the portal.

The new portal had the customer and the admin accounts. The major functions available in the Customer account are:

• Signing in.
• Viewing property tax details with tax bills and tax information (can be filtered by property).
• Viewing details about returns (filtered by date).
• Viewing tax bill, payment and tax appeal hearing details.
• Viewing and paying invoices (via Merchant One).
• Importing Property Taxes, Returns, Tax Bills, Payments, Invoices general tables to Excel tables.
• Viewing dashboards with consolidated tax data for the current year, total value by years, total savings, and more.

The Admin account had the following functions available:

• Get notifications about a new customer account request or personal info changes.
• Confirm/deny a new customer request.
• View customer info.
• Create new customer accounts.
• Add/disable custom fields for the customers’ view.
• Invite people to the customer portal via email.

ScienceSoft’s team also added a self-monitoring function to the portal that could detect errors emerging during the work with the portal and compiled them in a separate space.

Results

The Client increased customer satisfaction due to fast and convenient access to all tax information they needed. The new system corresponds to the Client’s current business needs in terms of functionality and can smoothly accommodate evolving requirements due to its flexible architecture.

Tools

.NET Core, React.js, Azure Cloud Services (Application Services, SQL Services), Azure Blob Storage, QuickBooks, SigerTax, Merchant One.