Tickler 2 Case Study

Developed by Evermore Enterprises, Tickler 2 provides the staff of Wyndelts & Co. with ubiquitous access to state-of-the-art workflow and document management tools that help them provide service with their signature excellence.

About Wyndelts & Co

Wyndelts & Co. Tickler 2 Login — Wyndelts & Co. Tickler 2 Main

Wyndelts & Company PLC is an elite accounting firm providing tax planning and a wide range of financial and business development services. Run by one of the foremost tax planning and business experts, their staff includes some of the top talent in their field. Wyndelts & Co works to develop a deep understanding of each individual client in order to best apply its exceptional expertise to each client's specific business and financial needs.

This may sound familiar. A parallel philosophy at Evermore Enterprises has made for a powerful partnership.

Tickler 1

The original “Tickler” was a spreadsheet stored on an expensive dedicated Windows Server at a hosting provider. This allowed access to employees at different locations.

Evermore‘s initial Tickler 1 system converted the existing spreadsheet into a simple web application, hosted on one of Evermore‘s low-load shared servers. This immediately and dramatically reduced the recurring costs. It also provided some extra benefits in data validation.

Tickler 1 worked very well for the better part of a decade.

Business Needs

As Wyndelts & Co. continued to grow, its customer base expanded to include an ever-increasing number of individuals and organizations with diverse multi-state interests. While Tickler 1 was still keeping their workflow organized, it was clear that they could benefit from additional automation and workflow monitoring. In addition, employees and contractors working from diverse locations increasingly needed to share and archive various workflow documents.

Tickler 2

Tickler 2 was developed to meet Wyndelts & Co.‘s growing business needs. It provides all the workflow tracking capabilities of Tickler 1 with added flexibility in viewing, sorting and organizing the data, as well as document management.

Accurate and Consistent

A more sophisticated data model eliminates duplication of information in the system, making for easier maintenance and increased confidence in its accuracy. Customer contact information, notes and important documents are all stored in one place. It‘s all simple to find and simple to keep current.

Controlled Access

Tickler 2 also provides superior data partitioning. Dedicated user logins restrict employee access to projects assigned by their managers. Highly granular permissions (using a standard Access Control List approach) are intelligently and automatically assigned by the system but, allow for flexible assignment and exceptions. Permissions and standard user management features (such as locking user accounts, resetting passwords and, checking login times) are all administered through an easy-to-use administrative interface.

Access and exception logging make auditing possible if needed.

Simple Interface

Tickler 2 uses a clean, “web 2.0” style interface with drop-down menus and, sortable and scrollable data tables. Expandable accordion sections organize information and optimize screen space for efficient use. The user interface can easily queue multiple files for upload and, provides progress indicators during transfer.

Automated Workflow Monitoring

Tickler 2 collects information from users that allows it to monitor workflow progress. For example, when collection of documents from a client is complete, it can notify the appropriate preparer that the project is ready for their attention. Similarly, the system can make note of approaching or missed target dates and, inform appropriate staff when additional action is required.

This reduces anxiety at Wyndelts & Co. and, makes it easier to maintain a consistent and productive workflow.

Making Data Easy to Use

In addition to built in reporting and sortable table views, Tickler 2 can export data to standard Excel spreadsheets, making more sophisticated data analysis and one-off reporting possible.

The Technology

Built on top of the flexible and sophisticated ECMS 2 core system, Tickler 2 is a LAMP stack application: servers using the Linux operating system run the Apache web server software with the MySQL database on the back end, the custom portions of CDB2 being written in the PHP programming language, HTML and JavaScript.

Of course, Tickler 2‘s effectiveness relies on Evermore‘s meticulous maintenance of the entire infrastructure.

Development and changes to Tickler 2 are handled in a dedicated development environment on separate, isolated servers. Once new code is working, passes automated testing and, is properly tagged and checked in to our source control system, we push it to the testing environment. There, the Wyndelts & Co. staff review changes to ensure they work as expected. The changes then are pushed to the live production environment.

The primary Tickler2 servers are located in a high-security Network Operations Center or “NOC” (with biometric authentication and live security) with redundant connections to multiple Internet backbone providers.

All of Tickler 2‘s data, including the managed documents are backed up regularly and automatically to multiple off-site locations, in addition to being stored on redundant media on the production system.

By using professional-grade infrastructure combined with attentive operational management, the Tickler 2 systems runs with the much-desired “five nines” of reliability (99.999% uptime). Evermore‘s proactive approach to maintenance, careful planning and monitoring has made this level of service in running Tickler 2 very cost-effective.