As a divorced mother with a daughter, Sheri Atwood knows firsthand the emotions, logistics and costs that come with post-divorce child support. And she also knows there are millions of parents in her shoes throughout the country who exchange child support and share child expenses. Sensing an opportunity to serve that audience, the former Silicon Valley executive created SupportPay by Ittavi, a program designed to help parents manage, track and pay their child support in a civil way that hopefully avoids a civil war between the two parties.

This summer, Atwood also launched a referral program for professionals who address the legal and financial needs of divorced parents, such as lawyers and financial advisors. SupportPay, Atwood says, “makes the advisor’s life easier in that they don’t have to answer everyday questions from clients like, ‘How come she didn’t pay me this?’ or ‘Should I go after him for this?’ or ‘Why didn’t I get this money?’

“It takes away the fighting that often occurs,” she adds.

As described on the company’s website, SupportPay aims to provide transparency so both parents can see how and where the money is spent, and it can do so without the need to get government workers involved. What it doesn’t do, as the company clearly states, is calculate child support obligations, enforce child support payments or act as a mediator.

SupportPay users register online and provide information about recurring expenses and how different categories are shared between both parents. The program’s colorful charts and graphs let users see all child support payments and expenses. It also lets users set up and automate payments, and handles multiple payment options—including cash, credit card and PayPal—while providing detailed payment history and reports. And it can be accessed on mobile devices SupportPay customers can use a free version or pay for a subscription-based plan with more features (the list price is $19.99 a month, though there’s a short-term promotion for $9.99 a month). The referral program for professionals offers a revenue share with anyone who refers a paying customer, and SupportPay promotes these partners to its customers.

Atwood says financial advisors have tapped into SupportPay because it helps protect their clients by providing certified proof that child support payments have been paid. And it boosts the odds that a client’s ex-mate is holding up his or her end of the deal. “Our customers are 90% more likely to exchange child support than without SupportPay,” she claims, adding that advisors usually register the client at the site (refer.supportpay.com/) and then the customer receives the invite from SupportPay.

“One of the big problems is how the divorced couple save jointly for the children,” Atwood says. “Do they agree on private school versus public school? What extracurricular activities are they willing to pay for at summer camp? These types of financial questions never get addressed because most people tend to focus on the actual divorce event, but not the ongoing event that happens afterwards, and that’s what causes the majority of the conflicts.”

Atwood is a former vice president of global solutions at Symantec Corp., a leading information security and backup company. She founded Ittavi (an acronym for the saying “It takes a village”) in 2011 with the goal of creating products that help families manage finances. SupportPay, which was two years in the making, launched in June 2013. She designed the SupportPay app herself and built the system on force.com by Salesforce, which she says provides multi-layer protection for the personal data of the nearly 20,000 parents on the SupportPay platform.