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Case study 01A · Financial SaaS

Keeping financial state trustworthy across systems.

At TEO, I own the payments and accounts-receivable path from invoice creation through hosted checkout, asynchronous processing, and the product state users ultimately trust.

  • TypeScript
  • QuickBooks
  • Payabli
  • Webhooks
  • Background workers
  • Design tokens
  • WCAG
01 · Role
Lead Full-Stack Engineer
02 · Domain
Property-management finance
03 · Focus
Payments, AR, product systems

01 · Problem

The screen was not the hard part.

A financial product cannot treat each integration response as its own version of the truth. QuickBooks, Payabli, webhooks, and background workers all observe or change a transaction at different moments.

The engineering problem was to preserve a coherent account of the invoice while keeping the interface useful, the payment path conservative, and the product foundation enforceable across the team.

02 · System

One money path, three engineering layers.

The product separates external events, durable financial state, and interface behavior so that each layer has a clear responsibility.

  1. 01

    Invoice and ledger state

    QuickBooks invoicing feeds a product model where invoice status is derived from the ledger rather than maintained as an unrelated flag.

  2. 02

    Payment event processing

    Payabli hosted checkout, webhook handlers, and background workers carry payment activity through asynchronous boundaries without treating an early response as final state.

  3. 03

    Enforced product foundations

    A three-layer token architecture, ESLint enforcement, and WCAG remediation give the interface system rules that can be checked instead of remembered.

03 · What made it hard

The money path has to fail closed.

Correctness here is not only about a successful transaction. It is also about refusing unsafe transitions and making discrepancies visible before they become financial state.

01

Default-deny safeguards

Ambiguous or incomplete financial conditions do not earn a permissive fallback. The system protects the boundary before dispatching a money-moving action.

02

Adversarial review

A multi-model AI review gate challenges assumptions in the payment path and supplements conventional engineering review on high-risk changes.

03

Accessible by construction

WCAG remediation and enforceable design tokens keep accessibility tied to the product system, not reserved for a cleanup pass after release.

04 · Next

Have a difficult system to make coherent?

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