REV Spain
Technical Architecture
See the Diagrams page for the deployment diagram. See the Functional Overview for goals, context, and users.
1. Building Block View
REV Spain is a monolith. Main internal modules:
- Intake module — claimant onboarding and document/data submission entry point
- Extraction engine — parses ITA and RNT documents (fixed-structure official Spanish government PDFs) using direct PDF text extraction (no OCR, since layout is standardized)
- Unified.to adapter — alternative ingestion path fetching employee/salary data directly from client HR/payroll systems
- Project & employee allocation module — gathers project information and maps employees to projects
- Eligibility rules engine — evaluates R&D tax credit eligibility criteria
- Report generator — produces both financial and technical claim reports
- Access control — role-based access for claimants, reviewers, and admins
2. Deployment View
Stack
- Frontend: Vue.js 3 SPA
- Backend: Node.js / Express API
- Data & document storage: MongoDB, including GridFS for document storage (no separate object storage service)
Topology
- VM 1 — runs the full application stack via Docker Compose (frontend, API, MongoDB)
- VM 2 — reverse proxy handling the domain name and TLS termination, forwarding to VM 1
This is a single-server deployment: no horizontal scaling or failover across app instances currently exists.
3. Risks & Technical Debt
- Single point of failure — the entire application stack (including the database) runs on one VM; no redundancy or failover.
- No documented scaling path — current architecture sits in tension with quality goals like fast data gathering and claims centralization at higher volume.
- Shared storage engine — MongoDB serves both transactional data and GridFS document storage; document I/O could contend with regular query load as usage grows.
- External dependency — the Unified.to ingestion path introduces availability dependency on a third party for one of the two data-gathering flows.
- PII handling — sensitive employee/salary data is processed directly by the core system in both ingestion paths; encryption, access control, and retention policies should be explicitly reviewed and documented.
Diagrams
Workflow — Claim Generation Flow
Technical Architecture — Deployment
Functional Overview
See the Diagrams page for the visual workflow.
1. Introduction & Goals
REV Spain lets companies self-manage the process of claiming Spanish R&D tax credits end to end: intake, eligibility check, extraction of employee/salary data from official documents, project information gathering, employee-to-project allocation, and generation of both financial and technical claim reports.
Quality Goals
- Self-service — minimal need for manual handling by internal teams
- Ease of use for non-technical claimants
- Fast data gathering (short time-to-claim)
- Centralization of claims across the organization
Stakeholders
- Top Management
- Head of Business Unit
- R&D Consultants
2. System Scope & Context
User Types
- Self-service claimants
- Internal reviewers
- Admins
External Systems
- Unified.to — third-party integration used as an alternative ingestion path when a client does not want to upload sensitive employee/salary data directly (e.g. pulls HR/payroll data from the client's own systems).
Sensitive Data Boundary
REV Spain handles sensitive employee and salary data directly in both ingestion paths: either after extraction from uploaded ITA/RNT documents, or via the Unified.to integration. There is no path that avoids the core system processing PII — this should be treated as a compliance-relevant boundary (encryption at rest/in transit, access control, retention policy).
3. Claim Generation Flow (Functional)
- Claimant submits ITA/RNT documents, or connects via Unified.to
- Employee & salary data is normalized
- Claimant/reviewer provides project information
- Employees are mapped to projects
- Eligibility criteria are evaluated
- Financial and technical reports are generated
- Internal reviewer validates the claim before export/submission