The Challenge

A County Government was relying on manual data entry into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage over 10,000 pension trust accounts for county employees. These included payment track records, tax rates, and interest rates. With frequent manual updates and tax rates that changed on a yearly basis, there was far too much margin for error in the system.

With no IT infrastructure in place and limited resources, the client required a partner to maintain the application. While development occurred nearly six years ago, Magenic still faces yearly challenges in maintenance and enhancements. Recently, an urgent challenge presented itself in the form of an amendment to a state tax law by congress with less than one month to go before the client’s timeline for new enhancements. Because the system is highly-dependent on tax rates, the logic was required to be updated last-minute.

The Solution

Magenic leveraged ASP.NET and a Microsoft SQL Server backend to create an automated system which would manage all aspects of the accounts from start to finish. Magenic Studios, our in-house user interface and user experience design team, provided all of the design for both the frontend, used by county employees, and the backend administration, used by pension trust office.

The ever-changing nature of tax laws, occasional enhancements, and limited manpower on the client’s side posed problems as well.  To keep the client worry-free, Magenic began an ongoing support and maintenance partnership to manage, maintain, and update the system.

For example, just one year ago, the client’s production and staging environments were both hosted on an aging server in its office. Magenic worked with the client’s IT department to provision four new virtual machines from their server farm, separating the web and database servers for maximum performance. The separate staging and production environments increased data protection and led to our client reporting vast improvements in the application’s speed.

The Result

Magenic’s application was launched on-time and without issue. Currently, it contains nearly 13,000 customer records, with over 5,000 accrual accounts actively taking in money from county information and over 3,000 distribution accounts. These accounts result in printing of a monthly paycheck and a yearly 1099R form. While development and deployment was completed in less than nine months, our maintenance partnership has spanned nearly five years and continues to this day.

The system has been such a success for our client that they are attempting to productize the application and sell it to other counties in the area as an out-of-the-box solution for their account management needs.