Inspiration
Account Tasker has one simple mission, enhancing business efficiency. We understand that running and growing a business requires efficiency of effort and focus on the right areas.
What it does
Account Tasker is all about simplicity and task automation, so that our customers can spend their time growing their business. With that in mind we have automated the task of manually downloading attachments. We zip up a file and email it to our customer. We know the frustration of watching a progress bar so our app doesn't do that. The zipped file contains a folder of all the extracted attachments for the specified date range and will be named after their respective Invoice/PO or Expense, again all to make our customers Xero experience a little more automated.
How I built it
Using Ruby on Rails with a PostgreSQL backend and the xeroizer gem to avail of the Xero accounting api's.
Where does it run
We are using AWS EC2 to host the application and the RDS Service to host the database Instance. The environments were created with the Elastic Beanstalk to simplify deployments and streamline our application lifecycle management. AWS also provides DNS services with Route 53 and SSL Certificates from the certificate manager. We have also taken advantage of the Simple Email Services for bulk mailing.
Challenges I ran into
The two major challenges we faced were performance and user experience. As the core premise of our App is automation, we wanted to develop it in a way that achieved the customers desired outcome in as short a timeframe as possible. One example of this is the decision to limit the date range to one month at a time. This eliminates the possible churn of attempting to extract a full years’ worth of attachments in one job. Monthly extracts also allow customers to target specific periods for specialised queries.
In keeping with the automation and simplification theme, we have developed a user-friendly interface with a lot of supporting information and easy to follow home screen and sign up options. By deciding to zip and email, customers can run their query and then switch focus to other tasks rather than wait for a progress bar to reach 100%.
While developing we discovered some unavailable features in the xeroizer gem that our app needed. We submitted a number of pull requests to have the gem modified, all of our requests were approved/merged and a new version of the gem has now been released which includes our changes.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud that we never lost sight of our end goal and continued to work on the app regardless of other workloads.
That we have integrated test coverage into our app and built it with best design practices in mind, heavily using OO principles, while always maintaining focus on the customers we think will use the App.
What I learned
That building a robust app takes longer than you might expect.
When you come across an issue there is always a solution, it just might not be obvious.
The pride in finishing what has been a long but interesting journey and being able to develop software for use with a commercially successful enterprise in Xero.
What's next for Account Tasker
We have lots of plans to grow, and plan to listen to user feedback to continue to enhance a product that is both easy to use and a great tool. In time we would like to automate other tasks, perhaps around auditing. Our long-term strategy is to develop a suite of add-ons that benefit customers and Xero alike.
We will continue to watch the xero community to understand the pain points of the their clients. This will serve as the guide for the up coming tools the team will be providing to ensure hassle free usage of xero products.
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