The second entry into the RiteTrack Challenge 2010 was a family management program developed on the RiteTrack platform called "Aurora Family Management." This entry was the brainchild of Ben Sims, Deployment Specialist at Handel Information Technologies, Inc.
Aurora Family Management was born out of the realization that accounting software only calculates budgets after your spending has hit the bank; and paper balancing is time consuming, top heavy, and difficult to do at a moment’s notice. After about 100 hours of work and some thankless testing by his wife, Ben created a system that will manage all of the family’s finances—including budgets for savings. Additionally, Aurora tracks specific accounts and displays specific amounts of money at the bank, and gives the user real-time responses with the balance of each account at a moment’s notice. Tracking spending also is easy because debits can be applied to any account via a cell phone, which enables the user to easily enter debts as they occur. Then the user knows exactly how much money is in any given account, even though that transaction may not have "hit" the bank yet.
See your current budget at a glance. Notice how you can add new items to your budget, clear the budget completely, or even export it to Excel to review.
One of the most advantageous features of Aurora is the ability to take a previous year’s budget, use it as a template, and create next year’s budget from it. Therefore the user can maintain the same budget for all of the recurring expenses without having to set it all up again, and it can give him/her a normalization of expenses for comparing years.
Above is the Yearly Budget Setup Wizard. Notice how you can copy certain or all months from a previous budget as well as add custom expenses as you see fit.
Finally, all of a budget, account, and savings information can be viewed at a glance through an executive dashboard. This dashboard shows exactly where a person is in relationship to his financial goals and budget.
Overview supplies quick understanding of the overall budget, totals in accounts and amount budgeted, as well as all of your savings goals (with a blue bar dictating how close you are to your goal).
Aurora Family Management was one of the judge’s favorites and scored well with the criteria. It showed that a complete solution for a problem that exists today can be designed, built, implemented, and tested in a little less than 100 hours. Ben was able to show us how flexible our own platform can be, and his was one of the most polished entries into the RiteTrack Challenge we have ever seen.
Want to see more? Next week, see how our third entry, called RiteNote, allowed any RiteTrack system user to utilize even old cellular technology to the latest and greatest, to update their cases when in the field without a laptop, tablet pc, or any internet connection at all. All you need is your cell phone.
If you are interested in learning more about any of these RiteTrack challenge entries and feel that they could solve an existing problem in your organization, please contact me directly via email at joe@handelit.com.