FCSLS initially started as a web-based project to help grain elevators track physical and futures transactions and help balance their position - hence the name Long (excess) and Short (deficit). Pages were built to allow low-level user access to enter transactions at remote elevators, and then a manager-level access was created to allow a centralized elevator to track position across the entire company, giving them the ability to enter offsetting futures transactions and view a net impact on position via Views. Views were designed with alerts in mind - to send emails, text messages, pop-up windows and even play sounds when a threshold is reached for a given View. This allows managers to quickly identify where they were exposed to risk and help cover that with hedges. Finally, there is a broker-level of interface that allows FCStone to interact with its client elevators and determine what their risk is and help them manage it.

The first version was spiced up with some basic AJAX capabilities for the main pages to allow easy entry of transactions and updating of data in View reports. FCStone has deployed LS to two separate companies that have entered over a total of 34,000 transactions in a little over a year.

FCSLS Version 2 was developed to overhaul the user interface and to add more functionality. The initial release contains advanced hedging functions to help them accurately track their risk in the futures market with reporting tailored to basis tracking, hedge positioning and profits-and-losses reports. It does all this and overhauls the old features in a 100% AJAX interface. Each page is downloaded once per visit and special navigation allows one to move between pages without having to wait for them to reload. Wakeup/Hibernate functionality is used to bring pages to life and validate their data or put them to sleep so they can quickly be called up later.