The Retirement Analysis Kit by The Annuity People, Inc.

The Annuity People, Inc., a Portland, Oregon-based software development firm, offers sales and marketing software for financial professionals in the retirement fields, often competing with in-house efforts from big financial firms and a host of specialty competitors.  The Annuity People develops sales and marketing software for financial professionals, including packages such as their Retirement Analysis Kit, a suite of tools to help sell 401(k) and other similar investment vehicles.  

The Challenge
Customers demand that applications adapt to their unique requirements and changing business climate. To keep their applications ahead of the curve in the always-changing field of retirement investment plans, The Annuity People needed a Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment that could let them quickly update a rock-solid code base. 

The Solution
Utilizing Delphi and ReportBuilder to develop robust applications quickly, The Annuity People has been able to outperform similar packages from big, national competitors. 

How The Retirement Analysis Kit (TRAK) Uses ReportBuilder

Overview
The Retirement Analysis Kit (TRAK) is organized as a suite of Calculators. The design is modular so that the set of calculators provided by TRAK can vary depending upon the customer’s needs and which tools they wish to purchase.

 

Customizable User Interface
Each calculator includes a comprehensive set of reports that are managed via a custom print dialog. ReportBuilder's open architecture enables TRAK to provide a custom user interface that seamlessly integrates the reporting functionality into the rest of the application. This is a strength over external applications such as Crystal Reports.

Managing Complexity
TRAK includes a large number of reports, many of which include a fair degree of complexity. One of the architectural goals of TRAK is to maximize maintainability by dynamically controlling the report layout while the report is generating. For example, the 3 screen shots below are generated by a single report running with 3 different options. ReportBuilder's support for subreports enables complex reports to be modeled as a set of subreports that can easily be controlled dynamically at run-time by using simple event-handler code.

Customization: Disclaimers, Charts, & Flowcharts
Many companies have unique content that must be included in their reports. One example is 'Disclaimers'. Every company wants their own custom disclaimer included with their reports. Another example is custom charts which can visually emphasize various aspects of data included with the report.

TRAK stores all report definitions in a database that can be customized for each customer. This enables simple deployment/updating and eliminates the need to perform separate builds for each customer. The screen shot below shows a customizable chart that appears in the application.

Either the developer or end-user customization that changes the appearance of the chart in the software also changes how the chart appears in the report. Here is the chart for the calculator above. Notice the gradient disappears:

With ReportBuilder, it is easy to create flow charts. Here is the flow chart in our software:

And here it is in our reports:

‘Batch Paycheck’ Calculator: TRAK’s Batch Paycheck Calculator illustrates another type of customization. Let me give you an example: an employer has 100’s of employees. They are going to meet regarding their retirement accounts. The employer would provide the employee’s paycheck data and the data could be imported into our application, allowing custom reports to be printed for each employee. The report can be customized at a great level: colors and charts, and/or grids. The report can also be customized to the employee level (different number of illustrations and retirement payout). The screenshot below shows an example in which the data in the program has simply been changed according to how the user wants it to appear.

RAP = Portability
TRAK implements all reporting logic using RAP, the run-time Pascal environment included with ReportBuilder Enterprise. RAP is easily extended so that complex logic and functions can be encapsulated into functions that are registered in RAP's code library.

Implementing all reporting logic in RAP enables reports to be completely portable so that they can be maintained and deployed outside of the application executable.

Conclusion
The Annuity People develops sales and marketing software for financial professionals, including packages such as their Retirement Analysis Kit, a suite of tools to help sell 401(k) and other similar investment vehicles. By utilizing Digital Metaphors’ ReportBuilder, The Annuity People, Inc. is able to build quality financial reporting solutions that meet their end-users' needs.

For more information on TRAK, please visit www.annuitypeople.com.