Yuki Counts on AWS to Power Automated Accountancy

A pioneer in its field, Yuki has kickstarted innovation in traditional on-premises accounting software. Founded in 2007, the Dutch company provides its 70,000 customers with an easy-to-use, automated accountancy and tax service.

The company has been all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for nearly a decade. While it began primarily with compute and storage services, it has since added new features for its customers, thanks to the integration of other AWS services.

Yuki serves two main client bases—small and medium-sized businesses, and tax and accountancy firms—and provides an automated accounting service for both.

Clients simply send in their financial documents, and the Yuki software takes care of everything needed for the automated processing of the documents, as well as automating the preparation of financial reports and tax returns. For entrepreneurs and businesses, this takes care of an essential business requirement for up-to-date accounts information. For accounting firms, it frees up time so they can provide a broader range of business and financial support services.

Yuki’s customers require reliable, secure, easy-to-use, and legally compliant systems—and the company relies on AWS to meet these needs. Yuki offers its accounting software both to accounting firms and to business users.

AWS offers Yuki the flexibility and scalability to serve both kinds of users equally well. Business users need fast and intuitive financial reports, while accounting firms rely on Yuki’s analytics and data audit services.

Tax and accountancy firms typically require more features and services than business users. They need instant scalability as they add new customers. And they’re more likely to need the ability to retrieve archived data for running analytics and data audits.

With AWS, Yuki provides all of that.

Yuki first began using AWS for object storage in 2009—just three years after the launch of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). By 2012, the company was all-in on AWS.

“Our main thing is the scalability and flexibility,” says Sebastian Toet, Yuki’s co-founder and chief software architect. “And the other thing is that we don’t need to employ dedicated IT staff - all of the infrastructure is handled by AWS.”

That was a big improvement over Yuki’s early years, he adds.

“At first, we had a hosting partner, so that’s where you traditionally lease your hardware for five years,” Toet says. “And in the first few years, you have far too much hardware, and in the last two years, you have far too little.”

Yuki uses Amazon S3 for the storage of all financial documents, and Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) for web and application servers. It uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for centralized customer and contract databases and Amazon DynamoDB for logging and session state actions.

The company manages 70,000 SQL databases—one for each of its 70,000 customers—spread out across 15 Amazon EC2 Instances.

With AWS, Yuki can instantly add server capacity when new customers come onboard. It can quickly reconfigure storage capacity when customers’ requirements change. It’s also able to take data snapshots, allowing its customers to roll back and restore data if needed. And it can ensure its services comply with data privacy, encryption, and security laws.

For example, lifetime retention of data on Amazon S3 and data encryption using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) means Yuki can stay compliant with the requirements of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

As a company committed to automating accounting tasks, Yuki has adopted AWS machine learning capabilities. It uses Amazon SageMaker Studio to finetune machine learning algorithms so it can extract the right data from documents, receipts, and invoices sent in by customers. In addition it uses AWS Step Functions to handle the workflow around this processing.

Toet says the system currently has a success rate of 70 to 80 percent in extracting the information it needs from customers’ documents. In fact, Yuki can handle between 50 and 60 percent of documents with no human intervention at all. Eventually, though, it would like to get that to 100 percent. Considering the number of documents involved—millions every year—even a one percent improvement in accuracy means big savings.

The new io2 volumes on Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) have made life easier for Yuki with less need for redundancy, over-provisioning, and manual backups. And it is in the process of shifting its main workloads from a traditional Amazon EC2 setup to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and microservices. The goal is to save costs and speed up its ability to develop and deliver new features to its customers.

Yuki currently has offices in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain, and is a part of the Visma Group, which is active in more than 20 countries worldwide. With AWS, Yuki has a seamless technology backbone that allows its staff to focus on expanding the business, finding customers, and ensuring compliance with different legal frameworks.

In the meantime, its technical and product teams can concentrate on making accountancy even more automated—both for Yuki and its customers.