The Client

R&G Brenner is a full-service Income Tax preparation business servicing over 1 million clients since 1941. The Brenner family has served the New York metropolitan community for 80 years. Over that time, hundreds of thousands of its clients have relocated nationally & internationally. 

R&G Brenner currently has clients residing in all 50 U.S. states & nearly 100 countries. While now a global firm, the client’s business philosophy has remained the same since 1941: providing expert professional services & superior customer service paired with the best available technology.

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The Challenge

R&G Brenner turned to Rootstrap to oversee the rebuild of a cross-platform mobile application and the development of new features to improve performance for its users. The client wanted Rootstrap to bring its existing app to a stable and maintainable state.

R&G sought out Rootstrap’s Discovery process to examine its existing app and associated "rescue mission" work required to bring the product back to stability and complete feature necessary upgrades before the next US tax season. 

The Rootstrap team needed a technical deep dive to review the current app functionality to determine necessary changes and improvements.

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The Solution

Conduct Technical Audit

The team assessed the current state of the codebase, infrastructure, and overall platform to propose solutions to continue development. They discovered the need for more robust maintenance across the entire solution, most importantly on the backend code and infrastructure platform.

Full Rebuild over Repairing

Rootstrap’s Discovery uncovered numerous code quality and structural issues that led the team to believe it would be more cost-effective for the client to complete a full rebuild of the product instead of repairing the existing RGB TaxApp.

Experienced Rescue Mission Team

Rootstrap enlisted delivery, engineering, project, and product managers, along with a backend developer, DevOps, and QA engineers, to the project. They worked closely with the client's internal team to build a new application from scratch, ensuring long-term maintainability with modern technologies and adding new features.

Key Technologies Used:

Ruby on Rails, Flutter, Docker, AWS, Linux, Nginx, SQL, React Native

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The Result

New High-Performance App

The R&G Brenner rescue mission came true in time for tax season, successfully achieving the client’s #1 goal of enlisting Rootstrap's services. The new and improved TaxApp allows users to complete their taxes and communicate seamlessly with the client. 

Additional Features & Ease of Use

The RGB TaxApp is designed for simplicity and to securely capture, transfer & access tax information with minimal actions. Rootstrap's robust tech stack provides R&G with a higher-performing app with underlying architecture and future integrations for development and ongoing maintenance.