A tax-credit filing platform

Preparing one of these studies means collecting detailed financial and personal information from a client business, calculating the credit correctly and producing the filing.

The firm needed one place for its staff to do that work for many client businesses, with each person seeing only what their role allows.

The platform holds Social Security numbers and other taxpayer information. Protecting that data was the first design constraint, ahead of any feature.

Sensitive values are encrypted when stored, are never written to logs and are not sent to the browser by default. Viewing one requires a specific permission and signing in again at that moment, and every viewing is recorded.

• Four staff roles, so each person can do what their job requires and no more
• Each firm’s data kept separate from every other firm’s
• Credit calculations documented alongside the tax rules they implement, with tests that prove the results
• One named owner for every study, from start to finish

• Written principles for the project, with one rule above the rest: when the code conflicts with a principle, the code is wrong
• The behavior of each part is agreed before it is built
• Technical decisions are recorded with their reasoning
• Dashboards and alerts are kept with the code and released with it