Investor Portal & Automated Report Generation
Challenge
Boost Labs was tasked to create an investor portal for Carmel Partners, a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) in California. The portal would serve a wide variety of purposes and updates would be rolled out in versions. The core purpose was to share fund performance, fund location/region, share investor documents, share investor conference videos, and generate automated quarterly reports.
Solution
Complexity and Work Performed We’ve all seen automated PDFs at this time; however, the task came with creating automated report with heavily customized D3 visualizations. We architected a complete unified data warehouse to store all the REIT information to be pulled in by the Portal. Through the Portal, the user can generate an automated report for a fund in a specific quarter for a year. The report could be anywhere from a few pages to dozens of pages, depending on the size of the Fund. We worked with specific technologies to convert D3 and our design templates into PDFs automatically and generate a single PDF download for the user. As an added complexity, the PDFs were not intended to be solely for digital consumption — these had to be fully printable, high quality PDFs. Being so, we had to make sure that the generated PDFs would be at least 300ppi. Not only did the portal serve as a portal for Investors to bring transparency to fund performance and allow the internal REIT team to generate Quarterly Reports, it was also used by the data team to manage data in the data warehouse. They had specific requirements to allow the download and upload of datasets as needed. Our Process We tackled this project from different angles: the Portal and the Quarterly Report generated tool. While our Development team worked on the architecture of the database and technologies we would be using to make all this happen, our Data and Design Teams were working closely with the client to understand the data and vision. Once all the requirements were outlined and understood, we proceeded with building out the data warehouse and technologies needed to make this vision a reality. As Design progressed and the vision began to take form, it was a matter of piecing everything together. We built this with a foundational mindset — this application had to be easy to maintain AND update. This was a Version 1, and we wanted to keep advancing it as time passed. As the beta version rolled out, we did a lot of internal testing in core groups and then opened it up to Investor testing as well. We would roll out patches, updates, and improvements as feedback was received and new functionality was added.
Results
Successful data consolidation into a single, unified data warehouse Returned time in manually creating quarterly reports (3 months endeavor turned to 10 minutes) Increased visibility for Investors into the Fund information Created larger reach to more Investors by having a single source for all documents and videos Increased efficiency of data management
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