About AFSS
Access Financial Services Sarl (AFSS) offers payroll and contract management services globally. The company has been providing accounting and financial management services to independent contractors and agencies since 2004. AFSS has its head office in Nyon, Switzerland and 10 offices worldwide, besides partners in around 70 countries. With its legal and compliant workforce management solutions, AFSS helps contractors and agencies in handling obligations in taxation, social security, immigration, employment, insurance and labour-leasing laws.
The Requirement
AFSS approached Cohezia Digital with its requirement to provide an online application to service Access Financials clients in UK and Ireland. AFSS was looking for a web based application which could be accessed by its clients (contractors) from these two countries and by its processing team based in India. Contractors would use the system for entering timesheet and base transactions data (about bank transactions & expenses). The AFSS accounting team would then use this data to process accounting, payroll & tax processing as per country specific rules. Accounting team would then generate necessary reports & outputs which would be accessed by the contractors in the online application.
Our Approach
In the requirements analysis phase, we realised that the proposed application had to host huge financial data of thousands of contractors from countries- especially UK and Ireland. The main challenge for us in building the application was to integrate it with accounting and payroll system, while meeting AFSS’ business requirements. The application was to be integrated to provide for a smooth business workflow, including invoicing, maintaining balance sheets, creating profit and loss statements and calculating taxes. We had to develop a reporting system that would help the users to create and manage reports. Another challenge was to comply with the UK government’s strict legal requirements for accounting, payrolling and taxation. We overcame this challenge by using an Application Programming Interface (API) and applying a web service over SOAP for transferring information for processing. We created a custom integration between the online application and their accounting and payrolling software. With this the AFSS could process the raw accounting and payroll data to provide processed data or reports. These processed data or reports could be accessible for the contractors in the application using their login.
Result
Our team of technical experts in the domain successfully built and integrated the application with the accounting and payroll system. After it was launched, the AFSS contractors could login, fill, access and manage all their financial data. Once the contractors fill in their data, the AFSS back office accounting team accesses that raw data, processes it and then flows the data back to the application. This effectively meets the AFSS’ requirement to reduce the time it takes to enter and process the contractor’s data in the accounting and payroll system by around 50 per cent. This also offers better reach to the contractors and brings functionality at their fingertips. The benefits that AFSS achieves with this application are:
- Efficient tax management
- Customization and flexibility in the workflow
- Improved revenue opportunities
- Better service
- Reducing time, administration and costs
- Self service empowers contractors
- Manage time and attendance