Enhanced Dashboard Search
For small merchants who sell things online or in-store, payments are a pretty straightforward process. A customer selects something to purchase, they use an in-store Point of Sale (POS) system or an online checkout page to pay, submit their method of payment and that’s it! But what about companies that process and settle transactions on behalf of smaller sub-merchants who use their software platforms to power their businesses? These companies can end up processing several hundreds of thousands of transactions per month.
Search is a primary function for business like this who use Finix for payment facilitation. It’s a core component to our high-performance dashboard that’s also one of the most used functions in our dashboard. Our original Search 1.0 solution was designed to run regular expression queries against data in our Relational Database (DB). This worked for a time but wasn’t well suited for complex searches on massive data sets like our customers have.
To solve this we switched to an Elasticsearch (ES) engine, which was purposely designed for searching text. To make the transition to ES, we did three main things:
Backfilled existing data
Built a service to insert new data in near real-time into the ES cluster
Enabled the expansion of filter sets from 6 to 14+ for several key dashboard pages, namely Authorizations and Transfers
Our customers are large SaaS organizations who employ engineers, back-of-house operators, and product leads to manage in-house payments operations. What this means for the small group of people or person behind the scenes managing payments infrastructure at large enterprise companies, is a drastic improvement of a foundational workflow tool.
Now operators have a seamless workflow and can search, track, review, and settle with ease and efficiency. For those who have the very important job of operating the flow of money, being able to search for things and find them without lags and challenges is imperative to conducting good business. A finance person, for example, can now see a screen of time-critical settlements above a certain amount that need her approval, in a fraction of a second, without having to hunt down additional information.
This small release helps to ensure that we're building a stable, foundational product that will support rapid growth, not just as we take on new customers at scale, but as our customers’ growth expands exponentially. And so far, the results are promising! Many of our customers immediately noticed the new filters and improved performance in their searches during processing and settlements.
Here at Finix, our mission is to help software companies become payments companies. One of the ways we do that is by keeping our customer’s goals and feedback at the forefront of product design and development. We’re proud to have done just that with the release of Search 2.0.