SaaS ISV Fiscontech improves the efficiency of accounting firms, by eliminating the arduous, manual processes of collecting input from dozens of sources at federal, state, and municipal levels.
Introduction & Background
Fiscontech is a Brazilian SaaS ISV that has developed an application that unifies disparate sources of fiscal and tax data from a wide spectrum of disconnected government agencies. In 2020, as a start-up, Fiscontech identified roadblocks in the efficiency of accounting firms, which were wasting too much time and money on repetitive and manual tasks.
The solution that Fiscontech engineered has become a success among accounting firms previously frustrated by the arduous, manual process of collecting input from dozens of sources at federal, state, and municipal levels.
Business Challenges & Goals
Fiscontech entered the market with a compelling solution aimed at accounting firms, highlighting the potential drawbacks of mistakes and reworks that can damage their reputation, as well as the missed opportunities to offer more consultative services and help customers grow.
Having deeply understood a major issue caused by excessive government bureaucracy, Fiscontech began developing the application for automating tasks as well as fiscal and tax processes. By automating the extraction of data into its application, the company helps its clients to eliminate manual processes, reduce errors, increase accounting efficiency, and shrink operating costs.
To enable the anticipated growth, Fiscontech needed a robust database in the cloud. To begin with, the startup selected AWS Aurora MySQL, but soon ran into performance and cost issues. In 2022, Fiscontech migrated to MySQL Heatwave, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Business Results & Metrics
By adopting MySQL Heatwave on OCI, Fiscontech improved performance by 90%. By moving from the AWS USA data center to Oracle Sao Paulo data center, latency was reduced from 70 milliseconds to 7 milliseconds.
At the same time, by transitioning from Amazon Aurora to MySQL Heatwave, Fiscontech was able to reduce its database costs by an impressive 95%, which allowed the company to pursue dedicated SaaS development and maintain a double-digit monthly growth rate—a highly desirable outcome.
Drawing on the maximum availability and scalability of MySQL Heatwave on OCI, Fiscontech provides 99.999% uptime for 30,000 accounts controlled by its 450 accounting services customers, some with up to 1,000 individual clients.
MySQL Document Store has provided Fiscontech's developers with a solution to manage 300 million constantly growing documents by working with SQL relational tables and schema-less JSON within the database. By utilizing this feature, they can scale out applications and replicate documents across all users, a functionality not previously available when using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
By establishing a VPN connection to OCI, security concerns related to public database endpoint issues have been eliminated. This approach connects the user base securely to the database without the need for a public IP address to worry about.
Fiscontech’s use of MySQL Heatwave and OCI is being continuously adopted by accounting offices relieved to find a service that automates the information search process, unifies fiscal data in a single panel, and makes it easy for their clients to visualize taxation with detailed analyses, reports, and management charts.
Why MySQL Heatwave
"The decision to migrate from AWS Aurora to MySQL HeatWave was driven by the need for cost savings, performance, document storage, and support. The result was 95% cost savings and 90% performance increase," said Diego da Fonseca.