How SoftLedger Eliminated Complex Caching Systems and Delivered Instant Multi-Entity Reports with Stream Processing

"It went from two minutes to one second. Epsio processes our database change stream to maintain always-current query results, so we're processing significantly less data to run these reports. Since launching Epsio in March, we've launched probably four new reports for the system and another whole integration that we got to focus on instead of spending months on performance optimization." — Geoff Ostrega, Co-founder & CTO, SoftLedger

SoftLedger achieves 120x performance improvement while preserving engineering velocity for customer innovation.

SoftLedger provides an accounting software platform that enables businesses running multiple entities to consolidate financial reporting seamlessly. The key to keeping their platform competitive is delivering instant financial insights for complex organizational structures. But traditional database approaches forced them into complex caching solutions that diverted engineering resources from customer value. SoftLedger now processes 10M+ journal entries monthly with sub-second reporting performance. Since solving their performance challenges, they've shipped four new reports and a native integration instead of spending months on performance optimization.

The Technological Backdrop

SoftLedger serves businesses that "run multiple business entities and need consolidated financial reporting"—one of the most demanding use cases in accounting software. Their accounting platform handles consolidated financial reporting, billing and collections, vendor payable management and other accounting functions for more than 1,500 organizations in more than 45 countries.

The platform is built on modern cloud-native technologies including EKS, AWS, and Aurora PostgreSQL, running containerized applications with Docker. The company needs to make financial reporting instant and reliable for accounting professionals who depend on real-time data for critical business decisions. To achieve this, they require infrastructure that can process millions of journal entries without performance degradation while maintaining always-current results.

The Challenge

SoftLedger was experiencing the classic scaling challenge that breaks most accounting platforms. As their customers grew, complex financial reports were taking minutes to generate instead of loading instantly. When customers accumulate 2+ million journal entries with multi-entity consolidations, traditional database queries become unmanageably slow.

The company was forced into a complex caching solution that pre-calculated reports during off-hours, leaving customers with outdated financial data during business hours. That increased system complexity and prevented customers from accessing real-time financial insights critical for decision-making.

SoftLedger needed to deliver instant reporting that scales with customer growth. They needed the flexibility to handle 10M+ journal entries monthly per tenant. They needed to eliminate complex caching infrastructure that diverted engineering resources. And they needed a solution that preserved their development velocity for shipping customer-focused features.

Geoff Ostrega, SoftLedger's Co-founder and CTO, had evaluated building custom optimization solutions, but recognized the resource cost. "We would have had to make a decision: lose some ARR—hundreds to thousands of dollars of these big customers because if they can't run financial statements, our product's worthless essentially—or invest in more engineering effort to solve this problem on our own."

"Performance is always going to be the top priority because our customers are always going to have more and more data"

The Solution

SoftLedger implemented Epsio's stream processing engine within their existing EKS, AWS, and Aurora PostgreSQL infrastructure. To optimize for their specific use case, the team architected their reporting layer to leverage Epsio's real-time stream processing capabilities, creating intermediary tables that aggregate data efficiently.

Epsio's deployment model fits seamlessly into SoftLedger's existing infrastructure by running entirely within their environment. Epsio provides complete visibility into performance metrics through DataDog integration, giving them confidence in their reporting accuracy and speed.

"What we do with Epsio is generate intermediary tables that aggregate the data much more efficiently, so we're processing significantly less data to run these reports."

Unlike traditional caching solutions they had implemented, Epsio lets SoftLedger work the way they want to work. The company integrated Epsio in just 1-2 weeks, focusing their development effort on architecting reports rather than managing complex infrastructure. They appreciate that Epsio performs stateful stream processing, maintaining query results by processing database changes in real-time rather than recalculating entire datasets, eliminating the maintenance overhead of cache invalidation logic.

SoftLedger's implementation showcases the power of choosing solutions that work with existing architecture rather than against it. Geoff reports the integration was straightforward: "The biggest development effort was architecting our reports to run off of the different SQL queries and validating that all the data was the same—basically putting in a week or two of effort."

"Since it's been turned on for our big customers, it's no complaints about reports and it kind of runs in the background and we just forget about it."

The Result

It's working. At SoftLedger, financial reports now load in seconds instead of minutes, enabling real-time decision-making for accounting professionals. Geoff says, "It went from two minutes to one second." This 120x performance improvement has eliminated customer complaints about slow reporting while handling their most demanding use cases at scale.

It's preserving resources. The Epsio approach eliminates complex caching infrastructure and enables SoftLedger's lean engineering team to focus on customer value creation. Geoff reports, "Since launching Epsio in March, we've launched probably four new reports for the system and another whole integration that we got to focus on instead."

It's scaling beautifully. SoftLedger now confidently serves customers processing 10M+ journal entries monthly without performance degradation. The solution runs automatically in the background, requiring zero maintenance overhead while consistently delivering sub-second results.