Custom Finance Software for Digital Transformation of Invoice Factoring

Invoice factoring helps contractual partners reduce financial risks while keeping their relationships simple. If the buying party (A) requires a delay in making payment, the supplier (B) can still deliver on schedule and get paid right away through accounts receivable financing. In this case, a factoring company or bank (C) buys the unpaid invoice from the supplier at a discount. Party A then clears the invoice directly through party C within the allotted time period as agreed upon in their mutual contract.

However, the invoice factoring process may present several downsides, such as long acceptance periods (which only adds delays), pledges, limits, a complicated pricing system, and contract payables that factoring companies completely own. The founders of Finomancer came up with an idea for custom finance software that would make invoice factoring better and more cost-efficient for everyone involved.

Finomancer’s plan was to set up an innovative factoring ecosystem, one that added investors as a fourth party. Building a comprehensive financial product like this would be inevitably complex, and demanded a highly intuitive user interface to ensure optimization.

Softage was recommended to the client as a custom finance software developer with a proven track record. We were tasked with building this first-of-its-kind product from scratch, and eagerly accepted the challenge.

In our experience, the Agile methodology has proven to be the best framework for startups, and this project was no exception. We structured the development into two-week sprints with daily meetings attended by the client. Throughout the course of this 9-month project, we refined our approach to the methodology. The team made sprint duration more flexible and introduced the best Agile practices, such as user stories, grooming, and retrospective meetings.

While simplifying invoice factoring to outpace the competition, this custom finance software still had to comply with relevant state regulations. This is especially crucial in regard to data acquisition, processing, and analysis. In addition to regulatory controls at the state level, the use of a nationwide digital signature is increasingly in demand, and our task was to meet official standards by enabling this feature across the entire Finomancer ecosystem as well.

We utilized the Red Hat jBPM engine to automate business processes within the ecosystem. Red Hat OpenShift Origin was selected to deploy an on-premises private cloud computing platform for additional security. User data management was enabled with Keycloak. We also integrated the open-source SuiteCRM to add customer relationship management to the suite of the digital factoring capabilities.

Softage’s team leveraged a testing pyramid to achieve a fail-safe continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), which fell in line with the DevOps methodology adopted on this project. This pyramid included unit, integration, and end-to-end testing.