PulseLedger
SaaS Resident Finance Transparency Platform
A resident welfare association (RWA) finance transparency platform — giving residents real-time visibility into maintenance collection, reserves, and society spending, while giving administrators the analytics and controls to run the community's finances accountably. Every number on every screen traces back to a real, auditable transaction.
Key Metrics
Resident, Admin, Superadmin
Resident and admin-facing views
Guided CSV wizard + automated ETL
Every create/update/delete/login/import
Overview
Most apartment/society management tools stop at collecting maintenance dues and printing a PDF statement once a year — residents rarely get real visibility into where their money actually goes, and committees juggle spreadsheets to spot problems.
PulseLedger replaces that opacity with a role-aware financial dashboard: residents get an always-current, self-explanatory view of collection health, contingency reserves, and spending; administrators and super-admins get the analytics (cost alerts, vendor concentration risk, income health checks) and operational controls (bulk data import, transaction management, access control, immutable audit logging) to actually run the society well.
The platform was designed around one principle: if a resident questions a figure, there should always be a clear, honest, drillable answer.
My Role
Solo product engineer — owned this end-to-end across the full stack: product/UX design, frontend and backend engineering, database and API architecture, data pipeline design, DevOps/deployment, and iterative UX refinement driven directly by real user (resident committee) feedback across multiple redesign cycles.
Key Features
Resident-Facing Dashboard
- •Overview — collection health, financial position, and reserve strength at a glance
- •Cashflow Health — income vs. expense trends and rolling maintenance-rate sparkline
- •Income Visibility — full breakdown with recovery-rate trend vs. health threshold
- •Opening & Closing Balance — transparent month-by-month running ledger
- •Head Drill-down — category → vendor → individual transaction in one click
- •In-app help system — role-aware HTML guide explaining every chart in plain language
Admin & Superadmin Controls
- •Action Needed — cross-cutting triage hub surfacing highest-priority alerts
- •Vendor Insights — spend/collection concentration-risk analysis
- •Cost Alerts & Income Optimisation — anomaly detection and irregular income flagging
- •Transactions (CRUD), Residents & Whitelist, Dashboard Controls
- •Immutable Audit Trail — every action logged with actor, IP, and timestamp
- •Dual data pipelines — guided CSV wizard and fully automated ETL pipeline
Architecture Highlights
Config-Driven Financial Logic
Per-sqft maintenance rates, contingency fund percentages, and collection targets are all supplied via CSV — a new month's numbers never require a code deploy.
Shared Exclusion Layer
Statutory tax (GST), unpaid dues, and internal reference data are structurally isolated from every "real income" calculation across the entire app — enforced once, reused everywhere.
Postgres Materialized Views
Monthly totals are pre-aggregated for fast dashboard loads and refreshed automatically after every data import, keeping reads snappy without sacrificing write flexibility.
Three-Tier RBAC + Allow-List Login
Role-based access enforced at both the API and UI layer. No email can request access without being explicitly whitelisted first — preventing unauthorized sign-ups by design.
Fully Containerized Deployment
API, database, mail-testing, SSR frontend, and Nginx reverse proxy are all Docker containers, deployed to an Azure VM with HTTPS via Let's Encrypt.
Dual Import Pipelines
A guided CSV wizard (Upload → Map → Preview → Commit) for controlled imports, plus a fully automated Python ETL pipeline for raw accountant/vendor exports — covering both supervised and bulk flows.
Notable Engineering Challenges
A silent 3× balance inflation bug
Traced a materialized view that had never joined against the transactions table's category/type metadata — it was blindly summing every credit-direction row regardless of whether it was real income, a statutory tax liability, or pure reference data. Root-caused it down to the missing SQL joins and shipped a migration that fixed every downstream dashboard at once.
From data-dump charts to insight-first design
Early dashboard charts grew to 5+ overlapping legends and mismatched scales (currency vs. percentage vs. per-sqft rate) as features accumulated. Redesigned by first asking "what story does each page uniquely own?" — eliminating cross-page duplication, splitting overloaded charts into focused panels, and replacing a near-static metric with a compact inline sparkline instead of another full chart.
Reconciling "Bank Balance" against "Opening Balance"
Two independently-computed balance figures disagreed by a shifting, hard-to-pin-down amount across several iterations. Diagnosed it to an off-by-one-period bug in a rolling "prior period" calculation that silently double-counted the currently selected period whenever a future month's reference data existed — fixed by resolving periods by calendar match instead of array position.
Zero-deploy financial parameter updates
Built the entire rate/target/contingency configuration layer around versioned CSV uploads rather than hardcoded constants — letting a non-technical admin update next month's maintenance rate or contingency percentage without ever touching code, while keeping full historical auditability of every past rate.
Technology Stack
Frontend
- •TanStack Start
- •TanStack Router (file-based)
- •TanStack Query
- •TypeScript
- •Tailwind CSS
- •shadcn/ui (Radix)
- •Recharts
Backend
- •Fastify (Node.js)
- •PostgreSQL
- •Materialized Views
- •JWT + OTP Email Auth
- •Zod validation
Data & Pipelines
- •Python ETL (mapping.yaml)
- •CSV import validation engine
- •Versioned config uploads
Infrastructure
- •Docker Compose
- •Nginx reverse proxy
- •Azure VM
- •Let's Encrypt / TLS
Business Impact
PulseLedger replaced the annual PDF statement with a live, self-explanatory dashboard — giving every resident the ability to understand their society's financial health at any time, not just once a year.
By surfacing vendor concentration risk, income anomalies, and cost alerts automatically, the platform reduced the committee's manual review burden and shifted their time from hunting spreadsheet discrepancies to taking action.
The immutable audit log and allow-list access model gave the resident committee a defensible, transparent record of every financial decision — building trust between administrators and residents in a way a shared Google Sheet never could.
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