Portal for accounting or automation of advance reports

    Hello! Today we decided to share the results of a small but important project, as it often happens very simple at first glance, things solve complex problems that give significant efficiency in everyday life.

    From our point of view, this material will be interesting primarily to those involved in the development and development of internal portals, and thinks that something useful can be done besides everyone’s favorite reference books of employees, news, birthdays and mother of their exchange rates.

    So, let’s imagine a medium-sized organization that is scattered across the territory of our large country, namely, such companies choose SharePoint as a corporate portal. The most ordinary employee is going to go on a business trip and here the most interesting part begins: fill out an application, coordinate with the head of staff, transfer to the personnel service, receive an advance on expenses, go on a business trip, fill out a report, hand it over to bookkeeping.

    To be honest, while writing, they themselves were already confused about what and in what sequence to do, but you still need to remember how to arrange everything correctly.
    If you imagine it graphically, it looks like this:



    Figures from real life - our customer’s employees make 20,000 business trips per year, you say this can’t be? is it not real? But let's look at this figure in a different way - these 20,000 missions are carried out by 4,000 people. That is an average of 5 business trips per person per year.

    Quite a real figure.

    BUT if you calculate the time it takes to support this process, then 200,000 hours come out ... Two hundred thousand hours, CARL!

    At one point, management made this calculation, shed a tear, and decided it was time to automate it all.

    And how can this be automated?


    We came up with a module for the customer’s corporate portal, integrated with the 1C and BOSS personnel systems used by the company, which allows employees to carry out the entire procedure for approving business trips and reporting electronically.

    And the procedure for coordinating trips began to look like this:



    The deadline for processing applications and coordinating reports was reduced to 1 day. There is no need for the physical presence of specialists, no need to draw up tons of paper documents. All online and in a short time. And even from a mobile.

    Sounds good, right? Now we will tell how we achieved this:

    1) UI / UX concept


    The first step was to work on UI / UX - draw simple, consistent, logical and convenient solution screens, and then move on to implementation.

    This is what the user screens look like:
    List of trips and adding a new application.


    Request for a trip.


    The form for approval of the application by the manager.


    The form of the advance report on the trip


    . In this form, the advance report is seen by the head and the accounting department.


    2) Attachment to SharePoint


    Then they began to fasten everything to the portal on SharePoint. The portal on the ball is good for everyone, except that it has no transaction. But for that we are specialists to solve non-standard tasks.

    We learned how to get around it this way:
    1. For example, to store a list of cities, goals and dates, we added a field of type Note to the SharePoint list:


    2. When saving the item, serialized JSON was saved in this field:
    requestListItem[Constants.Lists.Requests.Destinations] = JsonHelper.JsonSerializer(destinations); 
    


    3. To obtain data on cities, goals and dates when viewing, deserialize back:
    Destinations = JsonHelper.JsonDeserialize((string)item[Constants.Lists.Requests.Destinations])
    

    Sim-salabim and damage from Sharepoint removed.

    3) Integration with BOSS-personnel officer and 1C


    With systems BOSS-personnel officer and "1C Accounting" integrated through the SQL database using EntityFramework. But this task is more or less standard and depends on specific configurations. We are sure that you know what to do without us.

    4) Mobile version of the module


    And finally, they made a mobile version for processing travel applications right on the fly.

    You understand, on average, 5 business trips per person per year, this means one travels once a year, and another 50. There is still a caveat - in this particular company, very many do not have desktop computers, and even more laptops. But for those who, without a laptop from one business trip, fly immediately to another, the mobile form is simply irreplaceable.


    So, how we have provided mobility. They

    decided to use a single JavaScript, and switched between the mobile view and the main one using SharePoint tools:

    1. Created a device channel:


    2. Made a MasterPage switch depending on the channel.

    3. On the aspx page, we made the display and connection of scripts and css depending on the channel:


    For mobile and main display, they made View, which are similar in structure, but differ in layout. Below are examples of application lists.

    1. Basic:

    Твои командировки

    У тебя есть незакрытый аванс в размере  RUB. Ты не можешь взять новый аванс, пока не закроешь старый.
    У тебя есть сумма к возмещению в размере  RUB.
    ГородСтатусЦельСумма
    заявка на командировку
    0 -->Без аванса


    2. Mobile:

    Твои командировки

    У тебя есть незакрытый аванс в размере  RUB. Ты не можешь взять новый аванс, пока не закроешь старый.
    У тебя есть сумма к возмещению в размере  RUB.
    Заявка на командировку
    0 -->Без аванса



    Voila!

    This is how traditional processes that have worked for years can be changed and made fast and convenient, and most importantly less costly in terms of resources.

    At the same time, we did not invent a bicycle, but gently integrated into the existing IT ecosystem of the customer. The company has long and long chosen a strategy for working with a corporate portal as the main tool for communication with employees. And we are happy to help them make the SharePoint portal a truly effective work resource.

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