Practice management company deploys Elastic Cloud to improve performance of accounting firm workflows

A key feature of Karbon's practice management solution is the search capability accounting firm employees use to retrieve information relevant to a specific client. This data falls into two main categories: large CRM-related documents, such as contracts or reports, and smaller workflow-based records, such as emails, that are accessed on a more frequent basis.

Karbon has always offered search functionality, but its original solution provider wasn't flexible enough for its fast-scaling SaaS business. In addition, Karbon previously faced a major cost increase every time it exceeded storage thresholds. To stay within existing usage limits as long as possible, the company would make difficult decisions about what information to keep searchable, such as deleting older customer emails.

To overcome this challenge, Freeman and his team deployed Elasticsearch on Elastic Cloud running on Karbon's AWS cloud infrastructure. Freeman was attracted by Elastic's resource-based pricing model which allows him to add infrastructure at a competitive price as the business grows.

From a data jurisdiction perspective, it’s crucial that Karbon can run its solution in multiple territories, each with its own cloud presence. To date, it has clusters in around six different AWS regions.

Karbon has seen such success with Elastic that they are looking at ways of increasing the volume and categories of documents for search. This includes email attachments such as PDFs and spreadsheets. "There's a massive amount of content to index, but Elastic gives us the flexibility to do this affordably into the future," says Freeman.

He is also deploying Elastic Observability for end-to-end monitoring of Karbon's infrastructure. "We have six production data centers each with more than 100 services. Tracking the health of those services and being able to detect and resolve anomalies is of enormous potential value to our customers," says Freeman.

Most importantly, Karbon has seen an increase in positive customer feedback since rolling out Elastic. Working with Elastic, the company can confidently plan for growth, knowing it can scale as needed based on a cost-effective and predictable pricing plan.