Employee Benefits Store for the Brühlgut Foundation

Foundations with large workforces face a particular challenge in HR administration. They want to give their employees recognition and appreciation through in-kind benefits, while at the same time keeping budget control, traceability and accounting compliance clean. For Brühlgut Stiftung, a Swiss foundation with over 200 employees, we developed an internal benefit system that strikes exactly this balance.

We handled the project end-to-end, from concept through architecture to implementation and ongoing operation. Technologically the application is built on Laravel 11 as the backend and Vue 3 as a single-page application for the employee frontend. PostgreSQL serves as the database, Redis for caching and queue processing. The architecture follows the service layer pattern and is built for maintainability over years, not for fast delivery at any cost.

The technical heart is the credit logic. Each employee receives an annual budget in Swiss francs that can be redeemed in the shop. We built this logic from scratch, with pessimistic locking against race conditions during concurrent orders, with amounts stored as integer rappen to prevent rounding errors, and with full traceability of all transactions. Orders trigger events, which decouples side effects such as accounting exports or HR notifications and keeps them auditable. There is no external payment processing and no shipping, because the shop runs internally and fulfilment goes through the foundation's existing processes.

Because the challenge is very similar from foundation to foundation, we also offer the solution as a licensed product to other Swiss foundations. Foundations save the development cost of an in-house build and receive a proven system including maintenance, updates and adaptations to their individual processes.
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Since launch we have been looking after the Brühlgut Stiftung application continuously with maintenance, updates and extensions along evolving HR requirements. The project shows how even a seemingly simple "ordering tool" can develop into a fully-fledged business application when the business logic is taken seriously and there is no attempt to force standard software into a niche.