Team

2 Product designers, 2 Product managers, 2 Engineers

Duration

Understanding and researching the problem to be solved;

Prioritize opportunities with PM and leadership for major impact in short time, then iterate;

Creation of script, and conduction of usability tests

Construction of wireframes and final UI.

My role

3 months.

About Flash

Flash Expense is a product within the Flash ecosystem of corporate expenses, focused on requesting reimbursement from employees to the company, and providing an expense account with the corporate card. The corporate card is one of the company's main products, having grown 11x in 2023.

"Today the informations exists on the platform, but customers complain about not having everything in one place."

- Customer Sucesss

Context

Today for finance, there is no consolidated view for the month's closing, which means they need to manually search for:

• Spending by each person per month;

• Distribution of value to each person;

• Where spending is stuck in the flow;

• Status of expenses that are not in reports.

The challenge

From ticket analysis and conversations with internal and external customers, we were able to delve deeper and capture the pain points that we would resolve in this delivery. We started with a degree of uncertainty about how we would resolve the pain.

Accountability flow

For a better understanding of the project, below is the accountability flow that currently works on the platform.

Goals

• Resolve inconsistencies related to corporate card spending between different data sources;

• Facilitate the quick identification of outstanding corporate expense accounts.

• Facilitate the identification of which transactions resulted in the current card balance;

• Make it easier to quickly obtain the status of financial statements for expenses made with the corporate card.

• Enable the reconciliation of incoming and outgoing balances of corporate Flash Cash, which works as a company's corporate account, and card reconciliation.

Heuristic analysis

Research

• There is no way to track expenses that have not yet been included in reports;

• The main action, which would have to be accounted for, is not clear;

Accounting

• There is no way to know which reports contain card expenses, and which require reimbursement from the listing.

Cards section

• Many screens spread out, and none of them have all the necessary information.

Benchmarking

Direct and indirect concurrents corporate expense players were analyzed.

In general, the players analyzed present a page that centralizes expense management, with quickly consultable information regarding expenses and the card.

They also have a financial control section that presents employee balances and a dedicated area for extracting reports.

Area intended for monitoring reports by the finance department.

With the purpose of the screens defined, we carried out a co-creation section between designers and product managers to design the wireframes and be able to iterate with customers, ensuring that user needs would be resolved.

Ideation

Wireframe

We all got together to better define the scope, and understand where customer pain could be addressed on the screens.

The scope of the project was defined as improvements to the existing accounting section, and the creation of a screen with an overview of the expenses area.

Does bringing together the main finance tasks within one section make it easier?

Does the user quickly find where to track the status of financial statements?

How is the term Accounting understood by finance?

Are company administrators interested in collecting outstanding installments?

Hypotheses

In order to help in the construction of the script, we established some questions that we had to be able to answer through the interviews.

Usability testing

After creating the first low-fidelity prototypes, usability guided testing was conducted with 7 customers to identify any possible navigation difficulties and if the product was attending the needs.

Results

We let access to expenses that still needed accounting as a buttom link on the screen, but users were unable to find it.

For the final version we chose to leave this view as a tab.

The screen with the overview was very well received by customers, and with each interview we refined the information they reported most needing, and removed what was not important.

In general, the results were very positive, we made some changes to the screen structures and also improved the information to ensure the best experience.

We have made some improvements to create an experience that makes sense for users, and that they feel comfortable using daily with informations they needed the most.

Final version

The accountability screen was divided between the essential financial activities in order of priority.

First the finance team needs to see what needs to be accounted for, this is the final step for the report, if everything is ok, the report is approved and flagged as accounted for, and if not, it is rejected and returned to the employee for adjustments.

For each report it is possible to expand the table row and view all the expenses contained therein

Improvements

• main actions highlighted in the table;

• full visualization of pending reports, out of policy, and reports that have card expenses;

• visualization on table of all expenses inside a report;

• improvements on table filters.

After the accounting stage, in order of priority come the reports approval, which are not under the direct responsibility of the finance manager, but which he can interfere with, requesting approval from the approver who has a report.

This request already happens today, but outside the platform because there is no way to do this within the system, but it is something that was requested and well received by customers in the interviews.

Improvements

• possibility of charging the finance bill to the approver inside the plataform;

• visualization of the number of total pending approvals.

The last activity refers to the visualization of expenses that need to be accounted for by the employees. The expense was incurred, but the employee has not yet reported it to the company.

This is a view that does not currently exist on the platform and was requested by customers.

Finally, the last tab of the section contains a list of all reports, regardless of their status and the actions they require.

Improvements

• possibility of charging the finance bill to the approver inside the plataform;

• creation of visualization of expenses that have not yet been allocated to the account possibility of charging the employee whose not have done the accountability.

The expense panel screen has been requested by customers, who wanted a main screen that they could quickly look at and already know what their tasks were, and the main information without the need to enter several screens to get the necessary information.