The Direct Deposit System

The University of Texas Health Center at Tyler
Tyler, TX USA

The Direct Deposit System allows employees to retrieve their direct deposit statements on-line. The primary goal of this project was to save money as the result of a hospital-wide mandate to cut costs. The application's 1,000+ users LOVE it and wish we had gone this route years ago!

Users access the Direct Deposit system via a link on our intranet server. Once on the site, the user enters an ID and Password. The log in process retrieves his employee number so we can accurately identify who he is and make sure he does not access the wrong checks.

Once logged-in, the user has the ability to update his password and email address. The user then navigates to the advice/direct deposit selection page and selects the advice statement he wants. (We keep the most recent 12 months' advice statements available). Once the advice statement is selected, a PDF copy of the statement is emailed to his email address.

Application size and scope

The application utilizes two databases, one linked directly to our online application and one holding administrative information. I wrote an interface program to load data to the web page database. Since we are not on the Enterprise Edition of Iron Speed Designer, we were not able to achieve our desired results using views and joining multiple tables from multiple databases out of the box.

The application uses seven web pages and ten database tables. By the end of the first rolling 12 month period, each table will have 20,000 or more rows.

The project

The initial part of the project included building the base pages and only took a couple of days. Adding custom business logic took about three weeks.

I was the sole developer on this project. My background is programming and database management, including 13 years of client server, database, and user interfacing development experience. However, I have very little experience in web development. This was my first "production" web application using Iron Speed Designer.

Code extensions and customizations

We wrote about 200 lines of custom code in about ten different areas.

Page layout customizations

We changed some of the search capabilities and customized the look and feel of the application by changing some of the fonts and type faces. This application also required many enable/disable modifications.

Metrics for success

We estimate the Direct Deposit System saved the hospital about $30,000 dollars this year alone. This saving is derived from calculating the cost per statement printed on a "check printer" versus cost per statement printed on a "normal printer".

Iron Speed Designer impact

The project would have taken six months or more if I had not used Iron Speed Designer. Iron Speed Designer allowed us to get this project into production in less than two months.

About the developer

John graduated from Texas A&M University with a BBA in Business Analysis. He has been in the IT Industry since 1994, focusing on database management, programming, interfacing, and financial application support. John is new to the .NET world, with less than one years' experience.

Next steps

We are going to integrate our application with an Active Directory service which will retrieve user information, such as name, employee number, email address, etc. We currently don't store employee number on an Active Directory, but we are only a project or two away from making this a reality here at the health center. We are also going to expand the service of the application to include W-2 forms. Talks of an employee portal for total HR, Benefits, and Payroll access are already surfacing.