Sort of like a Spreadsheet
February 17th, 2014 by Gage Pacifera
Harmonic Northwest recently completed another round of work for Real Asset Portfolio Management‘s online fund management system. Basically the task was to add another category of data for fund managers to enter, cash flows. It entailed building a two-step questionnaire, cash flow management from the user home screen, and then functionality around downloading CSV-formatted data for administrators. This was an add-on to the pre-existing web app we put together for them using PHP, MySQL and a few different specialized JavaScript plugins.
The most interesting part of the work was the second page of the questionnaire where fund managers can enter in various types of cash flows. The mission was to try to make a dynamic web form that allowed for efficient data entry by taking some functional cues from spreadsheet software like Excel and Google Spreadsheets. The result was a unique user-friendly UI that blends the two nicely along with some extra functionality around disabling previously entered rows. Give it a try here:
http://public.harmonicnw.com/spreadsheet-form/
Right now we’re letting users play with this interface and seeing what kind of feedback we get. Some possible improvements include creating new rows automatically after hitting return at the end of a row and changing newly completed valid rows to non-editable mode.