# Lucasys turns deep tax expertise into three shipped products

**Lucasys**

Lucasys had decades of tax-accounting expertise and no capacity to turn it into software. We became their product team across design, engineering, and everything in between, and shipped three products for regulated utilities over a multi-year partnership.

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Company type | Startup |
| Company size | 10 - 50 people |
| Website | lucasys.com |
| Engagement | 18 - 36 months |
| Budget | $100k+ |

## Results

- Three products shipped for a startup finding its footing
- Automated a tax-basis balance sheet that used to take a team weeks
- A multi-year partnership across product, design, and engineering

## Deliverables

- Deferred tax calculator
- Automated tax-basis balance sheet
- ERP data integration and ETL pipeline
- Product design, mockups, and full-stack delivery on AWS

> Porter's ability to design efficient and effective software has enabled our creation of multiple products over the last two years. His technical expertise spans multiple industries, and his support and service to his customers is second to none.

— Stephen Strang, Cofounder & CTO, Lucasys

## A team of experts without a product team

Lucasys knew regulated-utility tax accounting cold. Their team had spent decades in the space, and they understood the problems their customers faced better than anyone. What they didn't have was a way to turn that knowledge into software.

They were early, still finding product-market fit, and the work of getting there was bigger than a domain team could take on. Product management, design, engineering, the whole arc from an idea to a product a customer will pay for. They needed a partner who could span all of it.

## More than a dev shop

We didn't just take a spec and write code. We worked as their product team.

That distinction matters, because shipping software is the easy part to name and the hard part to actually do. You build the product, then you iterate on customer feedback, run demos, stand up a website, and support the people using it. We handled that whole range with Lucasys so they could stay focused on the tax expertise only they had.

Over the partnership we designed and shipped three distinct products, each one taking a process that used to eat weeks of expert time and turning it into software.

### Deferred tax calculator

Utilities have to track deferred tax liabilities across many jurisdictions, with rates that change over time. It was manual, slow, and easy to get wrong. We built a calculator that automates the whole thing, so the numbers are accurate and current instead of reconstructed by hand.

### Automated tax-basis balance sheet

The tax-basis balance sheet is a primary control for a utility's taxes, and building one traditionally meant weeks of a team working in spreadsheets. We automated it end to end, turning that effort into a fraction of the time while making the result more reliable.

### ERP data integration

The data these tools need lives in large ERP systems that were never built with utility tax accounting in mind. We built a data pipeline to pull the right financial data, reshape it for tax and accounting use, and move it where it needed to go, so the products ran on clean, trustworthy inputs.

## Why it worked

The wins here came from pairing their domain expertise with a partner who could carry a product from idea to shipped and keep it running. Three products in under three years, each one turning specialized knowledge into something their customers could use, is what that partnership made possible.