Let there be numbers!

Kicking off 2017 with a powerful new feature set

It’s hard to believe that even less than a year ago TradeTapp was little more than a prototype — far from the working product being used by several enterprise clients today. What a year 2016 was for us. As we turn the page to the new year, we’ve turned our immediate focus to a number of new, critical features key to our whole product offering. TradeTapp’s first release of 2017, our 4th major product release, includes a key workflow solution for general contractors seeking to reduce some of the major inefficiencies and frictions of financial analysis.

After a subcontractor submits their application via the TradeTapp platform, the appropriate party (as permitted by the general contractor internally) is able to access the financial input feature. Of course, notifications of new submissions are emailed automatically.

We wanted to build a landing page where users can organize, preview, or edit exisiting financial records for a particular company. TradeTapp’s financial input dashboard is an easy way to refer back to documentation, without searching through emails or internal directories.

This is our favorite part of the financial input feature. TradeTapp renders the financial statement as a pdf side by side with the financial inputs. We’ve seen too many people forced to tab back and forth between file and an excel model. Here, everything you need is on a single page. A typical financial input takes about 5 minutes.

Often, financial statements contain multiple years of data. Shouldn’t your analysis include trending (Answer: of course it should)? We made this mutli-year entry as simple as an extra click.

We’ve even built in a few safeguards to ensure the quality of the data being transcribed.

Simple, easy, organized.

During the feedback process on this workflow, we were often asked things like: why did we design it this way? Did we know about OCR technology? Why force our general contractor users to enter this data manually? Our answer is simple: quality and timing. First, we believe having a subcontractor input their own financial data creates an unfair burden at best, and a conflict of interest at worst. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, quality data is fundamental to TradeTapp’s ability to deliver an accurate and holistic prequalification solution. We think that technology like OCR is an exciting concept, however, in the same time it would take to quality check the dozen or-so entry values for accuracy, a person could just as easily type this data. Certainly on a larger scale (say 1000 input fields), this type of technology might be more applicable and time saving.

Lastly, there’s one other key element at play, and that’s what’s gained from actually having a hands-on approach with financial analysis. Our experience tells us that spending at least a few minutes paging through a financial statement can lead to several important insights gained that may have otherwise not been learning. Whether it’s through notes, details, or otherwise, these details ultimately factor into the judgement needed to formulate a risk management approach for each award.

Additional Release 4 notes:

• Improvements for financial input management
• Enhancements to our existing data-collection module
• Bug Fixes

Coming soon:

• Benchmarking control panel
• Subcontractor data renewal management
• Automated reporting