Case Study: H&R Block Canada achieves trouble-free online tax filing and higher acceptance rates with New Relic

H&R Block Canada Provides Trouble-Free Online Tax Filing With Help From New Relic

H&R Block Canada, a leading tax-preparation firm with more than 1,200 offices, launched a free DIY online tax-filing app to disrupt the market but faced a high-stakes challenge: the product had to scale for huge traffic spikes and reliably produce NETFILE-accepted returns on and around Tax Day. Previously, rejection data from the Canada Revenue Agency arrived days to weeks later, making it hard to diagnose issues quickly and risking lost customers if filings failed.

To solve this, H&R Block Canada deployed the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform (APM, Browser, Insights, Mobile, Infrastructure and Synthetics) across test and production environments and built custom dashboards to monitor NETFILE transactions in real time. The team went from waiting weeks for error reports to identifying and fixing rejection-causing bugs within 30 minutes, improved NETFILE acceptance by more than 10% in a single week, gained full front- and backend visibility, and freed DevOps to focus on strategic work while empowering other teams with actionable metrics.

H&R Block

Dave Falkenberg

Director, Product Development & Compliance