Principled People | Software That Works
"Knowledgeable and able to provide "outside-the-box" website solutions that were cost-effective."
Captive & Project Manager, MCM CPAs & AdvisorsProject Manager, MCM CPAs & Advisors
Level 12 is a custom software solutions agency that helps businesses understand and conquer their unique challenges through expert analysis and tailored software, so that they can focus on moving forward.
- CTO consulting services
- App & database development
- Data warehouses, reporting & ETL pipelines
- Microsoft SQL server & reporting/automation suites like SSIS
- Systems & API integration
- AWS & Azure cloud development & devops
- IoT and Linux system programming
- Machine learning and computer vision automation
An example of a SaaS app we built: https://www.mineraltracker.com/
Case studies: https://www.level12.io/projects/
We are happy to consult with you on any software project/product you may be working on.

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Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), Payment Alliance International, Clearant, Road and Rail, Mineral Tracker, MCM CPA's and Advisors, Integrity Advisors

Machine Learning Windmill Inspection with Autonomous Drones
In this project we inspect power generation windmills with drones. We are responsible for the software that launches the drones, pulls the data off the drones, and then sends that to Microsoft Azure where we spin up huge GPU instances to process the images through a machine learning model that can identify blade defects. That all then gets automatically added to a graphical interface for the client to interface with that shows them the severity of the damage, which blade, etc. so they can schedule repairs.

Red E App Development and CTO Service
In this project we provided CTO as a Service to help guilde the overall develpoment direction of the Red E App SaaS product, as well as some developer support. Our high level guidance and software development expertise helped Red E App scale up their platform as well as accelerate the internal development lifecycle.

Logistics Analytics & Data Visualization
With many years invested in a legacy analytics tool that was no longer supported, our client needed to find a replacement that would allow their business users to continue to analyze and evaluate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and to pull reports for organizational activities and data.
The legacy application included approximately 20 business “views” that needed to be converted for use in the new tool. As their business continued to grow and change, there would be the need to add new data and views, so flexibility and adaptability were important.
The tool itself would need to:
- Provide high level summaries, multiple types of visualizations, and also be able to drill down into the details.
- Be web-based so that access to the tool was not hindered by location or worksite.
- Have a very flexible permission system that would accommodate our customer’s multi-level multi-site management structure without making sensitive data available to the wrong people.
- Be very user friendly for non-technical business users. Pushing important data deeper into their organization would be a big win for our customer.
- It needed to remain flexible and powerful for more advanced users and business analysts.
We worked with our client to research potential options and chose to implement Pentaho as the solution. We were responsible for installing and customizing the Pentaho application to meet their business needs. This included configuring the application to connect to Microsoft Active Directory for authentication as well as writing custom Java plugins for Pentaho in order to incorporate row level filtering for data access.
We designed and built a data warehouse and developed numerous (ETL) processes to organize and move data from their operations database into the data warehouse. We built an ETL framework that shared libraries with the operations database to cut down on development time and prevent errors caused by the ETL data models and operations data models getting out of sync. Most of the ETL pipeline and data cube configurations are covered by automated tests. Those tests help us catch errors early in the development process and give us confidence that the data these systems are providing to our users is correct.
As we converted each data view from the old tool to Pentaho, we worked with our customer to make sure the data that was being provided by the view was still relevant and accurate. Due to this attention to the current & real needs of our customer, their BI landscape changed considerably, for the better.
Today our customer uses Pentaho for most of their business intelligence needs. We have setup almost 50 different data cubes for their use. Those cubes cover a wide range of domains inside the organization including:
Operations
- Asset meter readings & utilization
- Asset Maintenance
- Customer Management
- Operational Efficiency
- Fuel Tracking
- Load Tracking
- Labor Efficiency
- Revenue Validation
- Safety
- Service Quality
Financial
- Asset Tracking
- Sales & Revenue
- P&L
- Vendor audits
Human Resources
- Staffing Goals
- Retention

Merchant Application Portal and Notifications
A Fortune 500 leader in banking and payment technologies needed to streamline the process involved in onboarding new merchant accounts.
This process needed to be improved for both their internal operations team as well as the internal and external sales teams who were submitting the applications.
Having already built a platform for processing residuals for this customer, they asked us to work with them to add on to that platform a portal that would:
- Notify the sales agent and/or team when an update to the merchant application was available.
- Provide the sales agent and/or team with reporting and statuses for each merchant application submitted.
An interesting twist on this project was that all the data for this system would eventually come from a different application workflow system that was being built by another vendor. Unfortunately, that system would not be ready for 3-6 months and our customer needed to provide merchant application updates ASAP. Therefore, the project was broken into two major phases:
- As fast as possible, get the notification and reporting portal up and running so sales agents and teams could login and get updates. In order to get data into this system, a “back-end” would also be created for the ops team to be able to login and manually update application records, set statuses, and leave notes.
- When the other vendor brings the application workflow system online, our system would provide an API that the workflow system would use to update our data. Once that link was established, we would remove the back-end code as the ops team would no longer use our system to update merchant applications.
Sales agents and teams would need to be able to receive updates by email or SMS text messages and would need to be able to choose the frequency of receipt of those messages.
The SolutionEven though we already had a relatively small project specification, we followed our standard process of delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) as soon as possible. This minimizing allowed us to deliver the most important features of the portal system within a few weeks!
When we were finished, the ops team could login into the portal to add and edit merchant applications to move them along in the onboarding process. The system ensured that users could only see and receive notifications for applications that were relevant to them or their sales team. The ops team were the only users that could modify application records, all other users of the system were read-only. As the merchant applications were updated, we created an audit trail so that an application’s movement through the process could be visualized.
Sales teams and agents could receive email notifications immediately or by daily digest. They could also receive SMS texts for events if desired. Each user of the system can update their notification preferences personally.
The system was made timezone aware so that portal information and notifications were reported in the user’s home timezone.
We worked with the other vendor to define the API for the application workflow system and then built the API it into the portal.

Merchant Residuals System Overhaul
A merchant processing company had retained us to build and maintain their residual (commission) reporting system since early 2008.
As time went on, the system was regularly expanded to handle additional calculations and logic related to the payment residuals. Unfortunately, the way the system was originally built was not ideal for the volume and complexity of calculations that were eventually asked of it.
As the system aged and the size of data grew, the calculations began to take longer and longer and the server resources used grew larger and larger. In addition, the needs of the customer were changing. Their monthly residuals process involved manually editing the Excel reports after they were generated to handle edge cases that the residuals calculator didn’t know about or didn’t have the data to handle. This meant that the actual residuals amounts paid to the customer would vary between the file and that data in the database, leading to difficulties when trying to report on residuals.
As time progressed, our customer desired to extend their residual reporting with more complex pricing options than the original system could support. In addition to this, their residuals team was constantly stretched to complete their monthly reporting cycle due to the amount of manual intervention needed. Reducing this workload was a priority, and would require a new reporting process. The need to be able to ensure that the calculated residuals numbers were correct, as well as the reports themselves, also rose in importance.
In 2014, after years of recommending an overhaul of this system, our customer was able to allocate the funds necessary to begin working on the project. The top priorities were:
- All residuals related calculations had to happen in the system. No more edits to the Excel reports after they were generated.
- The final residuals calculations would need to be stored in the database for easy reporting.
- Performance would need to be increased significantly.
- Feature enhancements that would make the calculation process more accurate and prevent or detect errors.
- Add non-bankcard payment products to the residuals reports.
Our solution was broken up into three main components and stages so we could use an iterative development process:
- The residuals calculator
- Report generation
- Everything else
We began working with the customer to fully spec the residuals calculation process, in order to determine what calculations and types of records would need to be supported. We then began coding with a full rewrite of the data model and calculator for residual records. Tests were written at the same time for automated confirmation of the calculator’s results, to prevent changes from having unintended results or bug regressions.
When the calculator was completed and “covered” with testing, our focus shifted to the reports. Again, tests were created to ensure that each cell on each worksheet was checked for accuracy. The reports generated from the new system were compared to the reports generated by the old system, plus any manual adjustments, to verify accuracy. Any discrepancies were debugged and fixed. This proved to be an incredibly valuable process as we sometimes found that the new system was correct and the older system and/or the manual changes being applied were creating errors.
At the point that the calculator and reporting process were determined to be significantly stable, we went to work on all the additional functionality. This included:
- Modifications to make it easier to enter and report on one-off monetary adjustments
- Pricing profile UI and database cleanup
- Emailing of residuals reports
- Improved monthly finalization logic
- Exception reporting
- Audit trail for pricing: if any rate, fee, adjustment, etc. is changed by a user, the customer has a record of that change so that calculations could always be reconstructed if necessary.
- The inclusion of residuals calculations for a number of different payment products beyond credit and debit cards.

Employee Training Management
Our customer is an industry leader and top-tier provider of rail related services.
They engaged us to develop custom software to help them track the training their 1100+ employees required and completed.
Training managers would need to be able to add and group training requirements together to create and monitor qualifications. Those managers would also need to be able to monitor expiration dates for both requirements and qualifications so employees and their site managers are notified when an employee needs to renew portions of their training.
It was important that the system had the ability to upload and attach documents for the purpose of:
- Distributing training materials to managers and employees
- Uploading certifications of training completion
Due to the large number of employees, worksites, and departments in the company, automation and other labor saving features were important to the success of the project.
Finally, our customer needed to funnel this data into their business intelligence solution so they could analyze the data for compliance and trends across their 1100+ employees.
SolutionWe took the initial project requirements and produced the intial production ready version in a matter of weeks. The training managers really benefitied from our iterative development process as they made frequent changes to the system as they learned more about the software and what they really wanted it to do. We were able to quickly respond to many change and feature requests, each time delivering an operational production version for continued use and review.
The resulting application:
- Tracks all training requirements
- Tracks qualification statuses of all employees
- Allows managers to record training
- Ability to assign training requirements either by groups or individually
- Allow employees to be exempted from some qualification requirements when necessary
- Notifies managers when employees’ qualifications are near expiration
- Manages training documents
- Managed qualification certification document requirements
Additionally, for reporting and business intelligence:
- Extract Transform Load (ETL) processes were created to move the data from the operations database to the customer’s datawarehouse.
- OLAP data cubes were created for data analsis

Custom Residuals Calculator
The Challenge
This project is for a Fortune 500 leader in banking and payment technologies.
When the leaders of their Merchant Services (credit card processing) division made plans to grow, they knew that new software systems would need to be put in place to facilitate the growth. One of the systems that would need to be built was a residuals (commission) calculator.
The residuals calculator is responsible for taking input data from the credit card processing companies, combining that information with payee profiles, and finally calculating the income, fees, and net payout for each merchant and payee in the system. When the customer first came to Level 12, that process was handled manually in Excel spreadsheets. But, they knew that process would not scale and a fully automated system would need to be created. In addition, they wanted their customers (the payees) to be automatically notified by email when residuals reports were ready and to be able to login to the web application to download their monthly payout statements.
In addition to the core functionality requested, the application would need to conform to a number of corporate IT policies that covered:
- the handling of Non-Public Information (NPI)
- user login and passwords policies and expiration
- encryption standards for sensitive information
- expiration of sensitive data
It would also need to have a flexible permission system to accommodate different user types and have hierarchy aware access to residuals and payee data.
The Solution
Due to our prior experience building software for the merchant services industry, we were able to jump into the project quickly and begin working on a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the residuals calculator system. That MVP included:
- refining and further documenting the specification of how residuals were calculated in the then-current manual system
- automated and encrypted transfer of data files from the customer’s servers to ours
- parsing of multi-line, fixed-width record format input files (holdovers from the mainframe era)
- creation of payee profiles and related payment settings for all payees
- creation of the residuals calculator engine
- generation of payee residuals reports
After the MVP was delivered, we started to validate the system’s residuals calculations against the data that was being calculated manually in Excel. All discrepancies were noted and fixed and this process was repeated for several months to ensure that all variations in the residuals input data were accounted for in the new calculator engine. This iteration was necessary because our customer did not have a formal specification for how to calculate residuals. The residuals calculation process was very ad-hoc and had been created over time. Therefore, it took several months of running the calculator against live data to find the many edge cases.
Approximately six months into development, the calculator reached a stable state and was able to replace the manual process in use at the time for calculating residuals. We then got to work on building out the customer facing side of the application, enhancing reporting, and implementing the rest of the features that were needed for corporate IT compliance prior to the application being made generally available.
About nine months into this project, our customer awarded us three additional projects for the following year.

Manufacturing Intake Form
The Challenge
Our client is a manufacturing company specializing in the reconditioning of industrial parts.
Their reconditioning process is broken down into two steps:
- Part intake, evaluation, and repair estimates
- Part repair
Once an estimate is made and repair is approved, our client uses an ERP system to track the repair through their plant. However, the intake step was being managed with paper forms. That proved to be very inefficient and our client did not have a good way to track parts that were on-site but not yet approved for repair.
They were looking for a software solution that would:
- make the intake process more efficient and streamlined
- ensure the data was captured electronically
- generate PDFs in place of the paper forms
- offer data validation and error checking
- set the stage for data integration with the ERP at a later date
The Solution
We worked with the client to review the paper forms and understand what steps were actually taken during the intake process. Unsurprisingly, the actual intake process in use had outgrown what the paper forms reflected. We then built a custom web application with a multi-page form that would do everything the paper form did and more.
Features of this application included:
- Mobile optimized for primary use by tablets in the shop area
- The intake form is dynamic and certain fields are hidden or shown depending on the part type to make filling out the necessary fields as easy as possible
- Fields that track roller measurements automatically convert standard to metric for easy reference and validation
- Common part form factor schematics are stored in the system and, when chosen, show the user which measurements need to be taken
- Multiple pictures can be taken right from the tablet’s camera and included with the form for easy reference
- Once submitted, the data is formatted, converted to a PDF, and emailed to the office
- All data is saved in a database so it will be available for additional phases of this project
Reviews
the project
Software Dev for Horse Race Analytics Company
"Their software is well-written and well-tested."
the reviewer
the review
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the managing partner of a horse racing data and analytics company.
What challenge were you trying to address with Level 12?
I needed someone with high-level network programming experience to set up a series of connections to outside vendors which involved APIs and data flow management systems.
What was the scope of their involvement?
After conversing with the providers, Level 12 set up the database, infrastructure, and connectivity. The team also set up the API for us to access that data. They used Python to code it out.
What is the team composition?
We worked with several teammates, including Randy (Chief Executive Developer).
How did you come to work with Level 12?
After doing a Google search and finding them, I met with one of their business development teammates. We chose them because they were local and had experience with Python.
How much have you invested with them?
We’ve spent well over $500,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We began working with Level 12 in the fall of 2016, and our engagement is ongoing.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
Level 12 does great work, and I have no doubt that what they’ve done for us is of the utmost quality. However, we’ve had a lot of struggles and challenges due to the continuous rotation of teammates working on our project and the expectations of when work should be done.
How did Level 12 perform from a project management standpoint?
The team has had some growing pains in terms of good communication and keeping us abreast of where they are in the pipeline of progress. It’s been quite frustrating, and we’ve had a couple of conversations with them about that recently.
They eventually get the work done, but it sometimes takes a really long time. Level 12 did put a project manager in place to serve as a liaison between us and the main developer, which helped a little bit, but then it petered off.
I understand that development work can slow down, but it’s challenging when I have to tell our partners that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. The timeliness and the meeting of deadlines have been a little bit lax.
What did you find most impressive about them?
Their software is well-written and well-tested. The end result is always solid. Level 12 does excellent work, it’s just the timeliness that has been an issue.
Are there any areas they could improve?
They always say that they need more developers because it’s a complex project, but we can’t invest more money if they’re not getting the work done in a timely manner right now.
They’re good people and they do great work, but they definitely have to figure out how to operate a little better in this space. We want more of a partner.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Be very specific about what is going to be built and when you can expect. There needs to be a consistent stream of communication throughout the entire process so that you don’t go three weeks wondering why something hasn’t been done.
You have to stay on top of it and make sure that the work is being done, because it sometimes felt like the developer who was on our project was doing other work, so our project was put on the backburner.
the project
Data Platform Dev for Software Platform
"Software development is instrumental and has been top-notch."
the reviewer
the review
The client submitted this review online.
Please describe your company and your position there.
Airtonomy is a software platform compatible with commercial drone hardware. Centered on advanced workflows, Airtonomy leverages artificial intelligence, robotics, IoT architecture and cloud computing to form a multi-purpose, on-demand solution that empowers users to automate processes, cut costs, and improve safety, all with the push of a button. Dr. Joshua M. Riedy is the Founder and CEO
For what projects/services did your company hire Level 12?
DevOps and Enterprise Software Development
What were your goals for this project?
Scalable, Secure Infrastructure and Software Development
How did you select this vendor?
Word of mouth led to a strategy session with Randy and Nick. From that point forward we chose to proceed with Level12.
Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.
Dev Ops and Software Development specific to applied use of sUAS and algorithmic work, predicated on IoT infrastructure.
What was the team composition?
Most work is performed by three team members working cohesively with Airtonomy staff.
Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?
Dev Ops and Software Software development is instrumental and has been top notch.
How was project management arranged and how effective was it?
Project management is shared between Level 12 and Airtonomy. Within Level 12, project management is embedded.
What did you find most impressive about this company?
The dedication to understanding customer needs, enough so to deliver upon them.
Are there any areas for improvement?
N/A
the project
Website Enhancements for CPA Firm
"They were knowledgeable and able to provide 'outside-the-box' website solutions that were cost-effective."
the reviewer
the review
The client submitted this review online.
Please describe your company and your position there.
Captive/Project Management of insurance companies as part of consulting services offered by a CPA firm.
For what projects/services did your company hire Level 12?
A client needed a full overhaul of their website in 2016 and an update in 2019.
What were your goals for this project?
To make the website user friendly and provide owner/insured login and access to risk management and other information.
How did you select this vendor?
The firm has used this vendor on other projects.
Describe the project in detail.
A client needed a full overhaul of their website in 2016. From 2016 - 2019 Level 12 provided support and consulting and then the website was given an update in 2019.
What was the team composition?
Initial meetings with a programmer and director of business development and then ongoing communication by email through the use of their service request email.
Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?
Successfully created a website that is user friendly and content/materials can be easily added by the client.
How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?
The project was completed in a timely manner.
What did you find most impressive about this company?
They were knowledgeable and able to provide 'outside-the-box' website solutions that were cost-effective.
Are there any areas for improvement?
I would like to see more communication and follow-up during the project but, it was completed in a timely manner so that did not deter from the outcome.
Level 12 does great work and delivers high-quality software. However, the team lacks communication skills, neglecting to provide regular progress updates. Although they often miss deadlines and don't do their work in a timely manner, they always sure to deliver very robust products.