Background
Fiscal Reps is a specialist tax consultancy providing tax compliance services to insurance companies and captive insurers worldwide.
As the business continued to grow, the manual process of gathering and validating submitted client data was becoming increasingly laborious to manage.
The new secure extranet allows clients to submit tax information, know exactly what they need to achieve compliance in each country they trade, and simplifies the processing required due to automated workflows, integration with their existing back-office systems and reporting.
Challenge
To improve the efficiency and accuracy of the service Fiscal Reps provide their insurance clients, and to reduce the time required to provide this service, an online document submission system was scoped out. It had the following technical requirements:
* Highly secure due to the sensitive nature of submitted data
* Integrated with Fiscal Reps’ existing back-office, business systems and processes
* Provide all stakeholders with visiblity over:
* What information has been received and when
* Whether this has been validated
* What is still required / outstanding in order to process a tax returns
* Approval of documents before they are returned to clients
* Knowledge-base documentation being shared with clients
Solution
Fiscal Reps requested that the application was written in Ruby on Rails, due to having in-house experience and other systems using this platform.
Initial wireframes and user stories were generated and validated with key stakeholders.
A prototype was built to validate the user journey and ensure correct workflow.
The application was delivered over a series of bi-weekly cycles to ensure frequent user feedback.
Results
The extranet greatly improves the service that Fiscal Reps are able to provide their clients by delivering:
Timely and accurate information: the secure extranet allows Fiscal Reps to receive and validate financial information submitted by clients – and identify which information is outstanding.
Increased productivity: ensures critical information is not buried in an emails. The extranet can monitor business activities and trigger specific actions, such as alerting Fiscal Reps employees to documents that are awaiting approval.
Reduced margin of error: includes a simple workflow to approve documents before they are returned to clients. This automatically identifies any differences between files based on the signature of each file – ensuring that no amended or updated documents are released to clients without approval.
Flexibility: allows partners, clients, and customers to retrieve information when and where it’s most convenient. This self-serve approach helps reduce the number of calls by clients requesting copies of their financial and tax information