Invoices - Keeping track
Keeping track of your company’s money is key for any business, at any stage. So when this company realized they had no centralized way to keep track of their invoices, we (as in the team and I) decided to build a simple internal dashboard for both clients and the Sales team to gain visibility.
The Problem
The company (a large enterprise) had no dedicated place for either internal departments or clients to understand their status when it came to invoices, current and upcoming. To track an invoice down, users had to contact via email a 2-person team, which worked on a global scale. This was not practical.
MY ROLE
I was involved in the research phase and initial conceptualization and design stages.
THE TIMELINE
This project was developed over 6 months.
THE TOOLS
Figma, Teams (for interviews)
Research & Discovery
We interviewed several internal workers to understand the current process when creating or retrieving invoices. We also explored how older invoices could be accessed, in the case a client needed to check past payments.
What we learned was that the information was not logged in any platform, but was sent to a team in charge of filing on a global scale. If a client needed an older invoice, they had to contact their Sales contact, who had to contact this internal team (regardless of where they were, geographically) and wait for their response. When found, the invoice would be simply emailed to the Sales person, who forwarded it to the client.
Insights
In terms of the most common pain points, we found that:
Users had little information on where to find their current or past invoices. In the interviews, most stated that finding reliable sources of information was more challenging than the process itself.
Neither client users nor Sales users were able to retrieve the needed information autonomously. They had to wait for the relevant department to respond with the required information, even if the department was in another time zone.
Users had no access to a compiled history of their invoices. They had to request the paperwork to be sent to them.
Interface planning and deployment
After understanding the priority issues and weeks of brainstorming and trying interfaces, we built the initial version of the platform. This internal tool allowed both client users and specific internal users to view the current and past invoices in their company's name.
Future iterations included:
A tool for Sales users to view a specific client’s invoices
The ability to pay via the platform itself
An integration with the main project management tool for minimized friction
