Receipt Reconciliation Web App
My role: Hifi design, handoff and support post hand off
Duration: 6 month
Team: 2 designers, 9 developers, 1 product owner, 1 scrum master
ABOUT RECEIPT RECONCILIATION
Receipt Reconciliation is a process that accountants use to reconcile the receipts with invoices for the closing that they do every period and then quarterly. Its a huge part of what the accountants do daily: they find out of balances and investigate them. First they need to understand the cause of the out of balance, next they need to fix it to avoid future out of balances. They look at lots of data and do it in Oracle reports or Legacy tools, that are data heavy and difficult to use.
Project overview
Problem: Accountants need to research & reconcile a lot of transactions (from 100s to 1000s). It’s difficult, time consuming and prone to errors.
Why it’s important: Finding incorrect transactions that cause OOB (out of balance) in legacy systems becomes not sustainable - it takes too long and leaves errors behind. This creates a financial picture that is not accurate. Which causes inaccurate projections, insufficient budgets and impacting the business bottom line.
Solution: We built web app that creates reports tailored to accounting needs, with custom features such as, color coded transaction status, sorting and filtering based on relevant criteria, commenting inside the report and exporting into excel.
This is what we have achieved in this project. Lets talk about how we got here.
Before
After
Pain points
After interviewing a dozen of accountants We have identified these pain points:
Accountants are looking at massive data tables, and looking through them manually is very difficult and time consuming
They look at different data sources and may have 10 different tools open to research one transaction. Some of the issues with that were:
difficulty to go between tools (they all look different)
loosing the transaction line in the sea of lines
load time for each tool (things would crash).
Accountants leave their notes, or questions in their notebooks or on sticky paper. Finding notes from a few month back was very hard.
When someone needs to pick up work or join the team - it is impossible to fill new people in on the details of some transactions.
Our approach was very lean. We listed out all ideas that can solve the problems accountants had. Then we did an importance difficulty matrix to identify what can we do for the MVP version.
Based on this we have decided to create a tool that would host all the same data the accountants need, but improving how they search and research it. There were a lot of ideas, and we broke them into 2 groups: must haves for MVP, and nice to haves for V1.
The main features and functionality for the new Receipt
Recon tool MVP version were:
the data table needs to have a clear distinction between in
balance and out of balance items
search and filter by:
out of balance
specific devision
period and year
certain dollar thresholds
PO number.
commenting
export into Excel
drill down details in collapsable rows
Utilizing design system for a rapid design phase
We were using Company Design System (KDS) and so there was a little need for the low fidelity work - since we could grab and experiment with available components. That being said, the design system didn’t have a data table component for us to use so we were designing that from scratch. But the general styles and colors were applied from KDS.
User testing
As we were in a rush there was no time for a proper usability testing. So what we did is create a prototype and let 5 of our accountants navigate it. The goal was - find the transactions that you need. After the sessions we realized that users care the most about the data in the table and the more row they can see on their screen the better their ability to find the needed transaction. So we got rid of the top card in favor of larger data table.
Key Metrics and Improvements:
Time Reduction: The app significantly reduced the time accountants spent researching transactions, from 2-4 hours to just 0.3-1 hour.
Tool Consolidation: Accountants were able to streamline their workflow by using just 1 tool instead of 4-7, reducing complexity and improving efficiency.
Error Reduction: The accuracy of the receipt reconciliation process improved dramatically, with error rates decreasing from 35% to 17%.
Work-Life Balance: The most significant impact was on accountants' work-life balance. By eliminating the need for late-night reconciling during period closes, accountants were able to manage their workload more effectively and enjoy a healthier work-life balance.
Overall, the Receipt Recon project was a resounding success, demonstrating the power of UX design in improving efficiency, accuracy, and employee satisfaction. These are some of the quotes captured during user testing.
“This is the best thing taht has happened in Receipt Recon in a decade”
“I don’t remember last time we didn’t have to stay till at least 9pm on a Tuesday of close!”
“I love the color coding for a status. We have done reconciling in mainframe for so long this looks like a dream.”