TwinBee

Laura Renner
CST 499 Directed Group Capstone
Gregory Brown and Dalia Faria
25 April 2020
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Executive Summary

Our client Laura Renner, the Founder and CEO of Freedom Makers, is looking to rectify

issues that occur between their clients’ prepaid payment plans and independent contractor

timesheet report. The issues interfere with their clients’ ability to accurately determine their

rolling prepaid hours between pay periods resulting in possible overcharged billing statements or

the loss of previously accounted hours that would otherwise be available for the independent

contractors.​ Our project aims to relieve the challenges faced between the clients and contractors

by resolving billing inconsistencies and rectifying time reporting instability. In an attempt to

mitigate these issues, we are creating a web-based application that serves as a portal with

administrative controls for Freedom Makers to manage client-contractor billing relations,

including a real-time reporting system with a clock-in, clock-out feature for contractor use.

T​he project is intended for the internal billing team of Freedom Makers, Laura’s clients

and independent contractors, which is largely comprised of the military veteran and spouse

community and the independent businesses that support this community. The end goal is to

create a long-term product that has administrative properties which Laura Renner and her

internal billing team may utilize to manage client-contractor billing relationships, track analytical

data for comparison reports, and serve as a client-contractor reporting timesheet with a live time

clock to track real-time work hours and calculate pay period totals.

A web based application that uses real-time time reporting with a clo 
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Table of Contents

Introduction

Project Goals & Objectives

Environmental Scan

Stakeholders & Community

Methodology

Project Considerations

Project Scope

References

Appendix
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Introduction
 
Project Description

Our client Laura Renner, the Founder and CEO of Freedom Makers, is looking to rectify

issues that occur between their prepaid payment plans and contractor timesheet report. The issues

interfere with their clients’ ability to accurately determine their rolling prepaid hours between

pay periods. We will create a real-time client billing timesheet that allows their clients to track

and manage prepaid hours in live time with their individual contractors. Clients will be

automatically charged based on their set payment plan with Freedom Makers and any additional

hours they did not prepay for in advance. The program is primarily a web application that

focuses around the Chargebee web API. This will benefit the internal billing team at Freedom

Makers and their billing efficiency between their clients and contractors.

Background

Laura Renner is the Founder and CEO of Freedom Makers, a privately owned recruiting

business in Oakland, California that specializes in business-to-business (B2B) sales offering

other businesses services through the employment and support of military veterans and spouses.

In short, Freedom Makers is a recruiting agency with a mission to provide employment for the

military affiliated workforce. Laura works with military veterans and spouses, whom we will

consider “contractors” or “freedom makers”, and assists them in finding independent contracting

positions or remote work with outside companies which we call her “clients”. Moreover, a
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contractor may work with more than one of Laura’s clients, and Laura’s clients can employ

multiple freedom makers.

Issue in Technology

The current billing process between her clients and contractors requires improvement to

guarantee accurate billing for prepaid hours in the interim of pay periods and to avoid

overcharging her clients. Currently, the billing method relies on the honor system and

documentation of an excel spreadsheet between the client and freedom maker. Therefore,

reporting hours can result in unaccounted prepaid hours or accrue additional charges for Laura’s

clients.

Solution to Problem

We envision the solution as a real-time client billing time sheet, which both clients and

contractors may utilize. The project will take place as a web-based application that a user can

access from any internet-accessible device.

Evidence Proposed Project is Needed

Laura Renner reached out via email inquiring of availability to work on her potential

project. She proposed the challenges she faced with her current billing process and stated she had

been actively looking for a solution to resolve these issues since the last year.
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Project Goals & Objectives

 
Project Objectives

● Project uses a Google account authenticator to log in.

● Main page displays a dashboard for different users: admin, clients, contractors.

● Admin page can control (add, edit/modify, delete/remove, manage) the clients and

contractor timesheets and profiles.

● Client page can review past billing history, edit and approve contractor timesheets.

● Contractor page can add, edit/modify, and submit individual timesheets.

 
Project Goals

● Relieve the time reporting discrepancy between Freedom Maker’s clients and contractors.

● Establish a unified system that allows all parties to manage hours and billing

relationships.

● Resolve potential inaccuracies with rolling prepaid hours between pay periods.

● Ensure a reliable billing system that assures accurate use of new billing period paid hours

that are not rolled over credits.

This project will be similar to a flexible cell phone billing plan; however, our project is

unique because it focuses on incorporating accuracy and transparency between Freedom Maker’s

clients and contractors. The project strictly accommodates consistency; by consistency, we are

defining this to the correctness of estimated roll-over hours and the arrangement of several

different payment plans that Freedom Makers has for their clients.While similar services are

offered by multiple entities including Chargebee’s competitors, the result is ultimately a product

that requires a great deal of manual configuration on the part of a small business owner that may

be unfamiliar with application configuration (Recurly, 2020). Many similar platforms argue that

their level of professional support is sufficient; however this is of little use to small businesses

that lack the time to effectively learn the intricacies of a new software (Chargify, 2020). As such,

our product aims to be tailored to specific needs as outlined by our client with little manual

configuration.

Our client’s outlook among businesses is unique; Laura has made clear a focus on

transparency, honesty, and fairness in her billing practices that takes priority over enhancing

revenue. This is directly contrary to the general marketing strategy of various billing services. A

brief overview of Recurly’s product page, for example, shows an impressively robust platform

covering retention, flexible integrations, optimations, international support, analytics, and more.

Combined, this provides an attractive option that unfortunately fails to focus on the customer’s

wellbeing. With this in mind, we set out to build a solution that wholly satisfies our client’s

unique needs.
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Stakeholders & Community
 
Client/End User

The project is intended for the internal billing team of Freedom Makers, Laura’s clients

and contractors. The major functionality will remain in the Admin page designed specifically for

Laura Renner and the internal billing team of Freedom Makers. The individual Client and

Contractor pages will cater to client and freedom makers respectively.

Laura’s audience, which will be her clients and freedom makers, will have access to the

platform, and individuals paired by Freedom Maker’s contract agreements are capable of fully

engaging with one another.

Potential Losses and Rectifications

With Laura’s current billing system, there are major potential losses for her clients and

freedom makers. The billing team currently utilizes excel spreadsheets, the honor system, and a

web application called Jotform to report work hours and reimbursements. Clients and freedom

makers may encounter issues in the billing process of hourly client credits and the potential loss

of hourly client credits caused by incorrect time reporting.

Our project aims to relieve the challenges faced between the clients and freedom makers

by resolving billing inconsistencies and rectifying time reporting instability. By incorporating

real-time interactive user reports, clients and freedom makers are ensured a reliable billing

platform that prevents the loss of and ensures the accurate use of credited hours.
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Methodology
 
Experimental Design

The project focuses on student capabilities to implement external web APIs and heavily

relies on the JavaScript programming language and frameworks. Due to the short timeframe and

narrow scope of the project, an Agile methodology will be used incorporating weekly sprints

with meetings held bi-weekly. Additionally, Agile has been shown to address common pitfalls

of unsuccessful software projects (The Standish Group, 2013). The project will implement a

Test-Driven-Development strategy for software development, kept on-course with the aid of

Pivotal-Tracker. Prior to development, interviews with the stakeholder have been and will

continue to be conducted in order to identify strict expectations throughout. It is planned to

maintain regular meetings bi-weekly in order to utilize client feedback at each iteration. Agile’s

inclusion of a “Product Owner” will reduce the likelihood of the project straying so far from the

client’s desires as to require a complete restart. This will be critical in maintaining a timely

delivery.

The iterative nature of Agile development means there will not be a great deal of early

planning and documentation. The client will aid in identifying a “Minimum Viable Product”, or

MVP, which the developers will analyze and split into distinct features and services. Each core

feature that makes up the MVP will act as an official milestone for tracking purposes. While

each of these optimally would consist of their own iteration, it is conceivable that some tasks will
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need to be separated into multiple smaller tasks. In the event of such a split, a milestone would

not be considered “complete” until all sub-parts are completed.

Based on early feedback, the initial design will likely take the form of a simple

web-application, thus allowing access from most connected devices. As the scale and timeframe

of the project are limited, Express.js will be used, allowing for rapid set-up with minimal

overhead. Existing authentication strategies, such as the use of OAuth2 in conjunction with

Google Sign-In, will both accelerate development time and help to ensure system stability by

using supported and proven libraries. Cloud hosting will be utilized to prevent possible

down-time due to power outages or other unforeseen circumstances at a local location as Laura

does not employ full-time IT staff. While this is a tradeoff that will have various implications,

availability is critical in maintaining transparency to Freedom Makers’ customer-base.

 
Ethical Considerations

Freedom Makers aims to serve the military veteran and spouse community. Laura’s

mission to serve this community has the potential to exacerbate military veteran and spousal

underemployment, which is a significant indicator of status and financial injustice. Relatively,

military veterans and spouses struggle with employment in careers within their industry, pay

grade, or qualifications; consequently, most will resort to accepting work or gigs that do not

nurture a career path simply to maintain a regular source of income.

 
Legal Considerations

Depending on other legal constitutions within Freedom Makers approved in place by

Laura Renner, the general considerations are to prevent any leakage of business conduct and

privacy information of any members or employees of Freedom Makers.

As our project will heavily rely on the use of the Heroku application for deployment and

Google web APIs, we have conducted further research on potential legal considerations that may

violate user terms (Google, 2019). Further research has reflected that the Heroku platform is in

compliance with GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, ISO, and SOC (Heroku, 2020). Regarding Google web

APIs, Google has the right to monitor the use of APIs to ensure quality, improve Google

products and services, and verify compliance with Google terms and agreements (Google, 2019).
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Project Scope
 
Project Timeline

Initial contact with the client Laura Renner took place in mid January 2020. A follow up

date will take place on Monday, April 13, 2020 to set a potential collaboration meeting to ensure

the project is in line with the client’s expectations. Project research will tentatively take place

starting Monday, April 20, 2020. Our first meeting to discuss the project and expectations with

her will take place on Thursday, April 23, 2020, and initial project steps will begin by Sunday,

April 26, 2020 or Monday, April 27, 2020. Laura agreed to weekly meetings to confirm her

expectations and monitor our progress with the project.

Week 1 Set up Heroku, database, Google Suite, and Node environment. Create Landing

Page, User Page, and Admin/Billing Page.

Week 2 Implement Admin/Billing Page functionality.

Week 3 Implement Maker and Client Page functionality.

Week 4 Set up notification method and verify functionality of classes.

Week 5 Troubleshoot, end-to-end testing, and perform final adjustments.

 
Budget

Laura Renner plans on offering an estimated stipend of $200 to cover any possible

expenses the project may incur. A survey of the necessary licenses places annual cost at $168; in

line with Laura’s proposed budget. The budget breakdown is as follows:

Domain $12 Annually (Google Domains, estimated pending final domain name)
Registration

G Suite $6 Monthly

Server Hosting $7 Monthly (Heroku, “Hobby” Dyno level)

 
Final Product Results and Dissemination

The final product will be a web based application where users can enter and track their

work hours. Laura Renner will have administrative capabilities to manage her clients and

contractor relations. Since the project is web-based, the platform should be easily accessible for

anyone with a Google account and link to the website. The working website will be hosted by

Heroku allowing for rapid deployment. Leveraging the integrated services by the platform

ultimately allows for a rapidly deployable and easily expandable product that will reduce the

time-to-market for our client.

The end goal is to create a long-term product that has administrative properties which

Laura Renner and her internal billing team may utilize to manage client-contractor billing

relationships, track analytical data for comparison reports, and serve as a client-contractor

reporting timesheet with a clock-in, clock-out feature to track real-time work hours and calculate

pay period totals.

Chargify. (2020). Recurring Billing: Subscription Billing Software. Retrieved from

Google. (2019). Google Developer TOS.Retrieved from https://developers.google.com/terms.

Google. (2019) Integrating Google Sign-In into your web app. Retrieved from
https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/web/sign-in.

Heroku. (2020). Heroku Security, Privacy, and Compliance: Heroku Dev Center. Retrieved from
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/security-privacy-compliance.

Recurly. (2020). Subscription Billing and Recurring Billing Platform: Recurly. Retrieved from
https://recurly.com/.

The Standish Group (2013). ​Chaos Manifesto 2013: Think Big, Act Small.​ Retrieved from
http://athena.ecs.csus.edu/~buckley/CSc231_files/Standish_2013_Report.pdf.
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Appendix

Usability

Laura and her billing team will first, most likely, test the functionality and then share the

application with their clients and independent contractors upon approval. In the event a portion

of the product is found unuseable, user feedback will guide continuous revisions until an

acceptable version is found. Additional troubleshooting and project updates will be scheduled for

deployment based on discussion. Further arrangements for project management have been

defined with Laura as a “per-request” inquiry, where she will have the ability to reach out to us

at any time for supplemental assistance.

Evaluation Test

Ultimately, Laura and her billing team with Freedom Makers will determine if the project

meets their desired results and anticipated standards. We plan on spending two weeks for full

end-to-end testing prior to preliminary review by Freedom Makers. Laura’s current expectations

of the project outcome have remained fairly open to allow us some leverage with the project

design and user interface layout. Laura’s tentative requirements are as follows:

● Hours are tracked in real time using a clock-in, clock-out approach.

● Admin/billing interface layouts are separate from client/contractor interface layouts.

● All users have the ability to log in with an email address.

● Pre-paid hours accurately roll-over between pay periods.