Turning accounting reports from a wait into an answer.

Centerbase is a multi-tenant legal-operations SaaS used by hundreds of US law firms. I led a reporting redesign for its hardest domain—accounting—so customers and their accounting teams could move from a frustrating wait of tens of seconds to results in about one second.

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Role

Technical Lead · Senior Full-Stack Engineer

Team

~40 delivery team · Dev Lead across 3 initiatives

Industry

Legal operations & financial workflows

Scope

Accounting reporting, product modernization, payments

The challenge

The reporting layer had to unify a complex financial domain—at runtime.

Core accounting had more than 20 transaction types, with data spread across many MS SQL tables. Chart of Accounts, Health Check, and T-Account reports called a stored procedure over a view with 98 SELECT branches joined by UNION ALL. Every report rebuilt that data model before a customer could see an answer.

How I led the work

Turning complexity into work the team could own.

Mapped every report branch to its source transaction

I traced each SELECT branch in the original view to the stored procedure and source table that produced its transaction type. That gave the redesign an explicit, testable mapping instead of an inferred reporting query.

Prepared reporting data as transactions were created

I designed and implemented a flat mapping table. Immediately after each original transaction insert, a dedicated stored procedure synchronously inserted its corresponding reporting record into that table.

Replaced the expensive read path

The reports moved from the 98-branch view to a lightweight SELECT against the prepared mapping table, filtered by transaction type. The new path ran correctly in production and replaced the former reporting view.

Outcome

Accounting teams could get the answer while the question still mattered.

The new reporting path improved performance by 300%: reports that had made users wait tens of seconds now typically return in about one second. Customers and accounting teams responded positively because they could look up information immediately.

~1 sec

report response, down from tens of seconds

UNION ALL branches replaced

300%

reported performance improvement

—Implemented the core solution directly, from source analysis through production rollout.
—Gave future reporting features a clear mapping model across 20+ transaction types.
—Kept accounting detail accurate without rebuilding the entire view on every request.

Other systems I led

Supernova · Microsoft 365 productivity

A document service that brought the legal workflow into Word and Outlook.

Microsoft GraphSharePointWord Add-inOutlook Add-inAzure

As Dev Lead, I worked with a distributed team of 4 developers in Vietnam and 1–2 in the US to build an independently deployable document service. It used Microsoft Graph and SharePoint while the add-ins called Core APIs for the business context they needed.

01
—A right-side panel surfaced matters, billing entries, and document templates directly inside Word and Outlook.
—Selected template data could be inserted into content or generated as a table, keeping document work close to the customer conversation.
—Each active tab had its own timer ID, persisted in storage and the database so time tracking followed the active document context.

Payment Service · Independent release path

A central payment gateway, separated from the monolith.

.NET 10ReactWebhooksLEDES 1998BMS SQL

I designed new modules and delivered payment features in a .NET 10 API and React frontend. The service moved payment workflows out of Core, allowing the team to deploy and evolve them independently.

02
—Accounting teams and admins can create and edit batches, approve, reject, resubmit, or void payments through a single approval level.
—Payment status flows through a third-party payment-automation platform via webhook, with logs available to investigate exceptional cases before updates are returned to Core.
—Built LEDES 1998B export templates with the required fields for US legal e-billing.

Platform & practices

MS SQL ServerStored ProceduresData Modeling.NETPerformance Engineering

“The durable win was not merely a faster report. It was turning an opaque financial workflow into a clear, maintainable data path that could support the product's next stage of growth.”