aPeso
aPeso is an all-in-one web solution designed to enhance employee engagement and loyalty at Adjarabet, a Flutter Entertainment company. At its core, aPeso operates as a full-fledged wallet for an internal virtual currency, rewarding employees for milestones like anniversaries, referrals, and active participation in company activities and tournaments.
The platform provides a structured approach to managing employee engagement through a centralized platform, making it easy for employees to earn, track, and redeem their aPeso balances. aPeso is integrated with an internal e-commerce system, allowing employees to browse and purchase products directly from the platform. It also connects with external vendors and enables employees to make purchases using their aPesos.
With its intuitive design and focus on fostering a culture of appreciation, aPeso simplifies how achievements are recognized and creates a more connected and motivated workplace environment.
We are responsible for
Scope:
Dedicated Agile Team
Team:
7 people
Duration:
7 months
Challenge
Adjarabet aimed to launch a loyalty platform for employees using a virtual currency, aPeso, to drive engagement, foster communication, and encourage participation in company events. However, no centralized platform was in place to manage this initiative effectively. The company was using Jira as a makeshift solution to store employee data and manually allocate aPeso, requiring custom-written endpoints to update the database with each transaction. This setup was not only manual but also highly fragmented, making the process cumbersome and time-consuming.
The lack of a flexible, automated system and the absence of any option for peer-to-peer transfers limited interaction and reduced the currency’s impact. The fragmented and manual nature of this setup made it nearly impossible to scale or provide a user-friendly experience.
Solution
To address these challenges, we designed and developed a robust virtual currency management system with a transparent and open transaction architecture. This new system introduced a full-fledged wallet with balance and transfer features, allowing each department and employee to have an individual account. We created a platform that enables Adjarabet's HR team to create loyalty programs and boost employee engagement by rewarding employees for milestones like anniversaries, referrals, and active participation in company activities. We also integrated the platform with internal e-commerce and external vendors, allowing employees to use their aPesos to purchase products. This solution transformed aPeso into a dynamic tool for employee engagement and interaction across the company.
Wallet
Since aPeso revolves around virtual currency, the platform incorporates essential wallet elements. Users can view their personal balances, send and receive aPesos from other employees, and shop for items directly through the platform. Employees also have access to the detailed transaction history on their wallet.
Centralized Currency Transaction Management & Monitoring
The admin panel provides full control over all currency-related processes. Admins can set and adjust the aPeso-to-GEL exchange rate using several parameters, review historical changes to the rate, and monitor cash flow across different balances and transaction types within the platform.
Redeem Through Shopping
The platform allows admins to add two types of shops - internal and external. The internal shop provides standard e-commerce features such as product catalogs, search and filtering, detailed product descriptions, cart and checkout pages, and order management. External shops are company vendors that provide products from their own systems. aPeso integrates with these external vendors through API connections, syncing user balances and order details to ensure a smooth, unified shopping experience.
Payment Gateway API
The payment gateway enables external shops to integrate aPeso as a secure and seamless payment method. With features like token-based authentication and IP whitelisting, the system ensures that all requests come from authorized sources. Admins can easily add external shops through the admin panel, generate API keys, and grant partner vendors access to the detailed documentation to connect with the aPeso platform.
The gateway supports a range of actions, including fetching user balances, checking statuses, processing payments, and handling refunds (including partial refunds). Comprehensive API documentation with clear instructions, examples, and detailed error messages simplifies the integration process, making it easy for external vendors to adopt aPeso as a reliable payment solution.
Employee Loyalty Program Management
Admins can create different types of events and activities that enhance employee loyalty and help them earn more aPesos. In the "Earnings" section, users can explore a variety of events and activities, along with the rewards they’ll receive upon completing them. To add a fun, competitive element, the platform includes a Tiers system - users are promoted to higher tiers as they participate in more loyalty programs, earning them better rewards and climbing the rankings.
Innovatorium
The Innovatorium feature allows employees to submit creative and unique ideas to improve the work experience through a simple ticketing system. Once submitted, the management team reviews these ideas and tracks their progress through different statuses. Selected ideas are rewarded with a set amount of aPesos, encouraging innovation and continuous improvement within the company.
Involvement & Process
Discovery & Requirements Gathering
Our product design process began with a series of collaborative workshops focused on requirements gathering, problem definition and solution architecture. These sessions included key client stakeholders from various departments to ensure alignment and gather diverse perspectives.
During these workshops, we brainstormed and sketched initial ideas and laid the foundation for the platform’s user experience. Based on these sketches, we developed detailed wireframes, which served as the blueprint for the interface, ensuring every functionality was thoughtfully planned and visually represented.
UI/UX Design
From the outset, we understood that aPeso’s users would be Adjarabet’s employees. This insight gave us a clear understanding of their needs and digital habits and allowed us to create a user-friendly design tailored to their expectations.
Guided by the wireframes, our design team crafted the platform’s UI with a focus on clarity and functionality. We worked in synchronized one-week sprints, ensuring each module or functionality was designed, validated, and ready for development by the end of the sprint.
To maintain a smooth workflow, our design and development sprints were fully aligned. Once a UI component was finalized, it transitioned to the development team as a ready-to-implement asset. Additionally, we conducted hand-off phases with both the client and the tech team, where designs underwent thorough validation before being officially handed over.
Front-end development
For the front-end, we built the application using Nuxt 3 and Vue 3, which gave us the flexibility of Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG) for better performance. We designed the interface with Quasar UI and Tailwind CSS, ensuring a clean and responsive layout. To manage state and handle data efficiently, we used @tanstack/vue-query, which made data fetching, caching, and synchronization easier.
We relied on Moment and Moment-Timezone to handle date and time logic, and for localization, we integrated @nuxtjs/i18n to support multiple languages. To keep the codebase clean and consistent, we used ESLint, Prettier, and Commitizen. For testing, we used Vitest and @vue/test-utils to ensure everything was working reliably and that refactoring could be done smoothly.
Throughout the development, we followed a pull request workflow with automated checks for linting, testing, and style, which made sure our frontend code was not only scalable but also maintainable in the long run.
Back-end development
Our backend service was built using Laravel 11. We applied the Actions pattern with invokable controllers to decouple functionalities and adhere to single-responsibility principles, resulting in better and faster development, safer refactoring, and easier debugging. We also implemented TDD (Test-Driven Development) with integration, feature, and unit tests.
For our database layer, we used PostgreSQL, which was also used during test executions on every pull request to ensure consistency with production environments.
In addition to the internal REST API used by our application, we developed a public API for the payment gateway, enabling external shops to integrate the Apeso payment method.
Our development process was managed via pull requests, which included code reviews and automated tests, as well as styling checks performed on each submission.
For documentation, we used Scribe; for testing, Pest; and for styling, Pint.
Meet the authors
We are a 200+ people agency and provide product design, software development, and creative growth marketing services to companies ranging from fresh startups to established enterprises. Our work has earned us 100+ international awards, partnerships with Laravel, Vue, Meta, and Google, and the title of Georgia’s agency of the year in 2019 and 2021.
