Product Background / Overview
The solution target is to generate complex business plans from simple economic studies. The user enters some product selling information, some investments, some general charges, persons to hire and other simple forms. The application then generates the Profit and Loss reports and Treasury reports.
Requirements Scenario
These reports are not generated directly from simple studies but from accounting items generated by the application.
These accounting items generation can be very complex because it should take into consideration the value dates, accounting periods, VAT calculations, partial payments and other parameters.
Those generation rules should be flexible, updatable by the administrator and easily testable.
Solution Implementation
We developed some models in Excel that generates accounting items.
When we inputs “parameters” in the first tab of one of those excel files then the generated accounting entries in another tab are adapting themselves (using excel formulas based on those parameters).
We then develop web forms where the end-user will input those parameters.
When the user clicks “Save” on the web form, we use Aspose.Cells to write those values into the Excel file parameters tab.
Then Aspose.Cells executes its engine to recalculate formulas of the “Accounting items” tab. Finally, we read back those accounting items in the Excel tab with Aspose.Cells and writes into an SQL table in those accounting entries.
After that, the user can request correctly filled up reports in our application.
Also when the business rules are changing, the only thing an administrator has to do is downloading the Excel model, modify it, and upload it back in the application.
Benefits
We found with Aspose.Cells a way to have:
- Fast Excel-based model calculations.
- Ability to the user to change and test models directly in Excel (no need for complex rules engines hard coded and hard to maintain for developers not having management knowledge).
Future Implementations
We are developing about 40 specific management applications per year. Many times those applications embed complex mathematic formulas that may change in later releases. We are sure to find new ways of using Aspose.Cells to propose solutions to manage complex business rules and to easy maintain and develop them without republishing applications.
Conclusion
Aspose helped us developing really quickly that application, it made us earn the time of not developing business rules but only the application itself.
Aspose is definitely a great way of getting rid of complex business rules hardcoded, and its calculation engine pretty well understands much more excel formulas keywords than its competitor (Farpoint, etc…).
It made its proofs in terms of performance and code design developers love to use it.
Screenshots
The input parameters of the model (investments amortization calculations):
Accounting items generated:
ASHIKHMIN Dimitri
Project Manager, FWA
