TaxDome’s continued investment in stability and increased performance: Q3 2023 update

At TaxDome, our goal is to provide the best workspace that is fast, easy to use and packed with essential features for firms to streamline their practices. We understand the crucial role the performance of our platform and the launch of new features play in achieving our goal. That’s why we didn’t want to make any compromises — and chose to focus on both.

Constant improvement is a company ethos — our team is constantly working on product updates in response to client needs and in accordance with our vision. Behind the scenes, we are continually investing in our infrastructure, speed, and scalability of our application. All of our teams are tasked with performance as a KPI, but in the past year we have assigned dedicated teams to focus solely on performance improvement. 

In this article, we’ll outline some of their crucial infrastructure improvements that have and will continue to lead to performance improvements in your workspace in the coming years. 

4X faster page load with SPA

Most web applications are server-side; this means that every time you open a new page, the information reloads. This allows for faster development and the smaller your application is, the more it makes sense. As we have increased (and will continue to do so) the scale of TaxDome’s offering, we have made a strategic decision to move to a single page application (SPA) infrastructure and for the better part of the last year, we have been undergoing this infrastructure overhaul. By adopting SPA, user flows are now up to four times faster.

What is SPA? It’s a web application that provides users with a seamless browsing experience due to a reduced server load. SPA operates within a single browser tab and, unlike traditional multi-page applications that require a full page reload for each interaction, SPAs dynamically update content on the current page without refreshing the entire page. By completely eliminating browser reloading, SPA provides a native app-like user experience.

The implementation of SPA helps firms complete tasks faster, serve more customers and drive future profit growth. SPA also sets the stage for the future capability of working offline. By adopting SPA, we were also able to achieve development optimization.

The more complex UI and system itself — the more beneficial SPA is. SPA provides more benefits for large teams to organize development processes such as separating back and front development and utilizing modern development tools. This improvement provides us with a better development environment, making our work more efficient and speeding up the process of fixing bugs and launching new features.

Performance improvements for docs, pipelines and time entries

We have also undergone an overhaul of some of the platform’s most crucial and most used pages: documents, pipelines, and time entries, all of which now load substantially faster. 

Document optimization

Document directories now load up to 40% faster, making it easier for firms to access and work on client files.

Better pipeline performance

Pipelines load 30% faster. For larger firms with over 1,000 accounts, the speed loads are even more substantial.

Time entries now load faster

Time entries load 25% faster. 

Other infrastructure improvements

We’ve also focused on other developments to take advantage of the latest technology, ensuring that TaxDome stays a leading platform in terms of efficiency and security.

Better load testing

As part of our efforts to enhance the platform’s performance, we’ve made significant investments in load testing. By implementing the k6 performance testing framework, we are able to simulate loads twice as high as peak loads during busy season. Such rigorous testing enables us to identify potential bottlenecks ahead of time and ensure that our platform can handle the highest expected loads.

Enhanced scalability

We can now scale our services more extensively and quickly in response to the load using the Kubernetes platform to optimize resources. The canary deployment approach, which helps us ensure the reliability of the new version and test features at a faster pace, results in more frequent product releases.

Updated infrastructure tooling and practices

We’ve employed a range of tools to optimize our development workflow. Specifically, we’ve deployed the Terraform tool to facilitate the consistent management of our infrastructure components. 

We also regularly update our dev libraries and frameworks to meet the latest technical requirements. This includes keeping the Node.js environment up to date and upgrading to the latest versions of Ruby and Ruby on Rails. 

We’ve greatly improved the tools for our frontend development to deliver high-quality product updates.

Backend request caching

We can now effectively implement partial data caching and optimize server requests by incorporating React Query into our system. Doing so reduces unnecessary network traffic and results in faster response times for the clients. 

Upcoming plans

We are committed to investing in infrastructure improvements to enhance performance. In addition to releasing new features and improving functionality, we are dedicated to further strengthening the codebase and refining our development approaches to deliver the best accounting, tax and bookkeeping practice management software.