Company creation, quotes, bills, expense forms, balance sheets and more. Entrepreneurs know that a company’s life is made up of a whole host of management operations which can be complex and time-consuming to manage, especially for small structures. In the vast majority of cases, these small structures look towards external accounting firms to help them with the day to day management of their organization. These are Tiime’s two targets. The French publisher proposes a platform which seeks to cover a company’s entire accounting management value chain. Whether for billing tools, purchasing collection, cash flow or even the business account, Tiime’s idea is to propose an integrated all-in-one solution to simplify entrepreneurs’ and accountants’ financial operations and to enable information to be shared between the two parties.

Originally created in 2015, driven by the specific requirements necessary for successful outsourced accounting operations, the solution quickly took off, launching in 2018 with major ambitions in the accounting production tool market. "We want one third of French entrepreneurs to be using at least one Tiime chain tool by 2025”, says Arnaud Grandchamp des Raux, the technical director of the publisher which now has over 200 employees and which passed the milestone of 10 million Euro in RAR (recurring annual revenue) in December 2022. Developed in SaaS mode, the service can be accessed via the web and a mobile app. This is a choice which meets the publisher’s desire to provide its clients with the simplest user experience possible, but which also imposes a high level of control of their own infrastructures on it. "We host the data”, emphasizes the CTO, “which means that we need to guarantee the permanent availability of the service, but also that this data is not corrupted, that it is protected with the right level of encryption and that it is correctly backed up”.

Performance, Simplicity and Resilience

One other issue is absorbing workload peaks. "We need to be able to support the service workload at all times, regardless of the variations", Arnaud Grandchamp des Raux stresses. The publisher is experiencing a high level of growth, with over 100 000 users in 2022, an increase of over 30% in one year, and around a thousand partner accounting firms, and needs to be able to maintain quality of service while these new users are adopting its tool. The platform takes charge of an average of 250 000 transactions every and has over 6 000 API calls per minute during the day. But certain periods are much busier when it comes to a company’s accounts. “The start of the month, for example, generates much more traffic, because of VAT declarations”, explains the manager. “The closing period also brings with it an increase in workload for us since clients access more data over extended time frames in order to finalize their balance sheets on time”.

The public cloud very quickly made its mark as the solution which is able to respond to these availability and scalability issues. Initially, Tiime opted for a PaaS service which infrastructures based on the Amazon Web Services cloud. But ultimately the publisher decided to migrate the whole platform directly to AWS. "One of our teams was already using an AWS service directly, as our previous provider was unable to supply the capacities we needed, and in addition our costs were starting to seriously increase as our growth was picking up speed”, explains the CTO. “We felt that it made much more sense to bring everything together on AWS”. In summer 2021, the team started to migrate the databases to Amazon RDS, before gradually migrating its application to Amazon EC2 instances and an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster. This migration brought a whole range of benefits with it. "First of all we saw an improvement in performance”, says Arnaud Grandchamp des Raux, “but not just that. The service simplified orchestration with auto-scaling capacities, improved monitoring with more complete and precise metrics and reinforced resilience thanks to the possibility of deploying our workloads over different regions".

Turning IT into a Competitive Advantage

For Tiime, this infrastructure now constitutes an direct competitive advantage, since it enables it to provide the features its clients expect. "The AWS cloud provides us with access to environments on demand and so to simpler, quicker and more effective test capacities, which reduce our time-to-market”, says Baptiste Lagache, DevSecOps project manager at Tiime. “Today we can deploy a development environment in 45 minutes, when it used to take us a whole day before. And production launch is then automated, which gives our developers more autonomy. This means that we can provide new functionalities more quickly to improve the user experience”.

The richness of the Amazon Web Services catalog and the power of the resources available also give Tiime’s teams the freedom to create high added value services for its end clients. The publisher has its own in-house team of data scientists who work on machine learning algorithms which seek in particular to automate a company’s entire accounting process up to its balance sheet. But these algorithms demand high calculation capacity to be executed, which the previous cloud provider was unable to supply. Victor Kannemacher, DataOps migration manager, says: “Our data team had started working with AWS in order to be able to access more powerful instances. Exploiting data is a key objective for delivering value to our users and our previous infrastructure limited our ability to process high volumes of information, while our clients were storing an extra 500 GB of data on our platform every month. Now we can have instances with different capacities according to our needs, including very powerful machines, and manage them with the same tools”.

We’ll see you in 10 years!

Handling this data obviously requires a high level of trust between Tiime and its clients. “Companies entrust us with sensitive financial data and it’s reassuring for them to know that we’re supported by a state of the art technical stack.” The publisher is also subject to regulatory obligations imposed by the association of chartered accountants. "For example, we have to keep certain documents such as bills for a legal duration of 10 years and we have to make sure that the files aren’t modified over this period". To do this, Tiime uses Amazon S3 storage, which not only provides it with all the space it needs, but also integrates the Object Lock function, which certifies that a file hasn’t been modified over the retention period defined by the user. "The services are also "GDPR by Design", notes Arnaud Grandchamp des Raux. “This means that from the development phase we are able to plan how we can export or delete certain data if requested by the client. We also have the guarantee that the data never leaves Europe. These days clients often ask us how we comply with GDPR and the AWS cloud gives us the answer for them”.

Tiime is therefore continuing to grow in its market, supported by an infrastructure which is ready to assist its development. The publisher wants to automate more and more processes in the future, in order to simplify even further the work of its users, who over the next two years will need to adapt to new legal obligations on electronic billing. “We need to look towards the uses of tomorrow and it is clear that the management of virtual documentary flows and how to use data effectively will be key objectives in company accounting”.