Schwartz & Schwartz, a family-owned accounting firm in San Diego, has been serving individuals and small businesses for over 35 years. The firm envisioned a scalable, tech-forward model to extend their accounting expertise beyond traditional services.

To bring this vision to life, Managing Partner Jacob Schwartz partnered with Xebia to develop Hedgi — an AI-powered app that helps small businesses maximize tax deductions, reduce audit risk, and benchmark financial performance. Built leveraging the OutSystems platform, Hedgi is reshaping how tax planning and bookkeeping are done.

To scale expert tax services and empower more small businesses.

Why

Built Hedgi — an AI-powered tax planning and benchmarking app.

What

Xebia and OutSystems partnered to deliver 30 to 40% more value by leveraging pre-constructed modules.

How

“Building Hedgi wasn't easy, especially at first. But then Xebia stepped in. I'm an accountant, not a software engineer. I had a vision for how I wanted the app to look and feel and perform, but it took a team of experts to make that vision into reality. I had the outcome in mind at the start - to translate my expertise in tax preparation and bookkeeping into software - and Xebia turned that vision into something real that works. And they did this for about half the cost of a custom development shop, all while building on a platform known for reliability and security.”
Jacob Schwartz
Managing Partner, Schwartz & Schwartz

Building Hedgi with Xebia and OutSystems

Schwartz & Schwartz partnered with Xebia to bring Hedgi to life. From the start, the collaboration was seamless — iterative development, clear feedback loops, and strong execution turned Jacob Schwartz’s vision into reality.

OutSystems was leveraged as the low-code platform due to its scalability, built-in security, and cloud-native flexibility. As a growing financial services app, Hedgi needed robust identity management, data encryption, and audit-readiness — all of which came out-of-the-box with OutSystems.

Cost efficiency was another critical factor. Funded entirely by Schwartz & Schwartz, the project benefited from OutSystems’ reusable components and Xebia’s low-code expertise — enabling rapid development at 30–40% lower cost than traditional builds.

Xebia combined its product engineering capabilities with OutSystems’ enterprise-grade features to deliver Hedgi faster, smarter, and more securely — without compromising on performance or compliance.

Learn more about Xebia's OutSystems capabilities

A future-ready app built on a scalable platform

Hedgi went live to strong client feedback, even during early rollouts. Existing Schwartz & Schwartz clients quickly saw value — gaining better control and visibility over bookkeeping, long before the full feature set was in place.

With features like benchmarking and risk scoring, Hedgi now helps small businesses make smarter financial decisions. Internally, it has significantly accelerated tax return preparation and unlocked a new revenue stream: partnering with other accounting firms to automate low-risk transactions.

Hedgi is designed to scale with performance and data security that meets the needs of growing regional and national customer bases. As more users adopt the application, Hedgi’s benchmarking engine only gets smarter, helping democratize tax intelligence for small businesses.

Response

Related Topics

Context Files