Client work · Independent school
Financial Edge Connector
A small authenticated web app that lets a school's faculty see their own budget data, pulled from the accounting platform they were never given access to. Built deliberately lightweight, because the people who have to run it are not software engineers. Running in production at two independent schools, Vermont Academy and Cardigan Mountain School, where it is the paid product of Tall Poppies LLC.
The problem
The finance platform held the budget numbers, but its interface assumes a user in the finance office, so a department head checking a remaining balance would need training in an enterprise accounting system.
In practice the workflow was email: a request to the business office, a manually run report, and an answer that arrived days later and was already out of date.
What we built
A Flask app that authenticates faculty with their existing Google accounts, pulls budget data from the school's accounting platform through the Blackbaud Sky API, and shows each person a view scoped to what is actually theirs. No new password, no training, no report request.
It runs on a free-tier Oracle Cloud virtual machine.
Design constraints
The school's own IT team operates the application, alongside their other responsibilities, which drove the technical decisions:
- Small on purpose. This is not a product and was never designed to become one. Flask, few dependencies, an architecture someone can read in an afternoon.
- Authentication they already have. Google auth means no user table to manage, no password resets, and offboarding happens automatically when the school disables an account.
- Read-only against the source of truth. The accounting platform stays authoritative. The app is a window, so it cannot corrupt anything, which is what makes it safe to hand over.
Where it stands
Deployed and running. Built with Stephen Solberg under the TallPoppies name.