Reece Donovan

Doing business faster than the speed of money

Conceived in 2012 as a unified accruing tool to replace many countries' ad-hoc tracking and accruing systems, it works by collating many sources of data: daily/weekly sales from sales systems, historically posted sales, manual overwrites/uplifts and other data-points. With this data, Accruals can come up with the most accurate suggestions for the accrual amounts. This enables countries to complete their affiliate reporting and move on with business without being held up by the "speed of money" (the true financial information/statements are received on a monthly basis, sometimes well after the fact!) Once the real financial information does become available, this is then fed back into the system, adjustments are reported, and data enriched for future accrual decisions.

The greatest front-end complexities (apart from the usual ones associated with pushing the framework far beyond its limits) center around the system's multi-layered state-dependent permissions - functionality is changed/enabled/restricted by a combination of country, client, user groups, user roles and current processing state of the data.

The biggest single challenge, however, was migrating/re-writing 10 years of cumulative front-end development into a modern MVVM architecture. The migration took place over many hundreds of "spare" hours in 2022/23. It was a monumental task and probably the greatest challenge of my programming career to date.

Accruals was the first project to break ice on WebSockets usage for presenting real-time data updates to users in the front-end. The standards and architecture created to service Accruals still exists today, and is now used in many projects throughout the company.