Sarsha Adrian, who founded Collaborative Financial Concepts and designed Business Pay Connection, has a long background in technology, including DEC and IBM. She built Business Pay Connection on Microsoft’s .NET.

“The development environment of .NET is absolutely fantastic, and I have been developing software my whole life,” she said. “We owe our ability to do rapid prototyping to .NET. We could sit with a customer and design the software right at the table and have a prototype up and running. .NET is good; it is reliable, and Microsoft has built a lot of features into the software. This is a phenomenal environment to develop in.” Half her development team came from Java background, she added.

“They all love .NET now. They rave about how fast they can develop, and the quality assurance process is just great. We are a total .NET shop,” she said.

Speed to functionality is important in the post DOT.COM world because investors want to see a prototype, or a functioning application, before they will advance money. She spent time at Enterprise Bank in Lowell, MA, seeing how the bankers work and how lending officers do their job.

“We designed this system so we can easily configure it to the way any bank is organized. We wanted to make sure they didn’t need to add any more manpower or hire a specialist. To do that, you have to work within a bank and understand the workflow.”

From user feedback the company decided to put everything on a single page, so even though it is a Web-based application, it functions like a PC application.

“Customers said they want it to be as easy to use as an ATM,” she said. Users can see the purchase order and invoice, and see when they are matched and the bank receives the buyer’s approval to pay the seller. The system has a complete audit trail.

“A firm’s controller can see new orders coming in and the sums being paid out, all on a single screen,” she said. “Purchase orders are matched to invoices electronically, so if an order changes, you can make the changes in real-time. Users call us the Windows of the financial world, because we make it easy.”