Team work with: Cynderela Pazarán.
My role: Main UXer, Reaseacher and Visual designer.
The following project was carried out for a FINTECH related to invoincing and taxes return processes in Mexico, 2018.
OVERVIEW
The world of tax returns is quite broad, so we approached the accounting team to understand their processes and recognize their problems. We found that one of their stoppers is a wrong internal process during the bank reconciliation step.
what is a bank reconciliation?
It’s an interval process to ascertain there are no differences between the balance of an entity’s accounting records of a cash account and the records in the bank statement. The goal is to ensure that a company’s cash balance is accurate and no discrepancy of any kind.
“The reaction of weak management to weak is often weak accounting”
- Watten Buffett
The process is manually and carried out by a team of bookkeepers helped by the use of excel sheets and an accounting tool. For this case, the daily use platform does not have all the information, resulting in long working hours and out of timely deliveries.
DISCOVERY
INTERVIEWS
The product team with the stakeholders were able to define a problem ease but to get a complete understanding we scheduled sessions with accounting experts to learn about their day-to-day. In the end, we managed to form a person who shows both needs and perks.
PERSONA PROFILE
INTERVIEW INSIGHTS
USER EXPERIENCE
USER JOURNEY
Every business must record its financial transactions (income and expenses), so bookkeepers could able to claim tax deductions at the end of the year. A monthly reconciliation must be done to confirm that all bank transactions are uncleared and there is no discrepancy.
**THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF WORKFLOW FOR TAX RETURN IN MEXICO, IT MAY VARY DEPENDING ON THE OFFICE AND THE ACCOUNTANT.
Bank reconciliation may be tedious, but the financial hygiene will pay off. Here’s why it is so important to help bookkeepers with an advanced service to accomplish their tasks:
To see the magnitude and the growth of the business/client
To track cash flow
To detect fraud
To detect bank errors
USER FLOWS
HOW TO DO A BANK RECONCILIATION?
When you do bank reconciliation, you first need the bank transactions responsible for your books and your bank statement account being out of sync. Then match balances and record what you did.
In other words, for our internal tool, we choose to define two different paths which allow bookkeepers to accomplish the task faster.
First flow, automatic reconciliation, our goal is artificial intelligence capable of matching transactions and invoices automatically using old records and customer behaviors as guidelines.
To push the first step, we need a manual reconciliation, which means an improvement of the current manual service that lives in the internal tool. To do that, we need to add links between Mexico National Banks and our services to get the account statements and then get all the book records*. After having all the information, bookkeepers can do a manual matching.
*access to all invoices and receipts generated in an established period.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
UI DESIGN
ART DIRECTION
One of the problems when working with an internal tool is that not many understand the importance of having consistency with the visual part. The decision was made to do some research on other modern platforms and UIs, and then use our mobile service library as a base. The result was that agents and accountants felt more motivated and happy to use the tool.
LIGHTNING DEMO [BENCHMARK]
BRAIN STORMING SESSION & SKETCHING
Complex projects mean more time, creativity, and stoppers to form a perfect solution. How can we approach it? At some point, when we are assigned a project we think that only we should solve it, but we are wrong, the best option is to talk to the team, whether it is product or design. So after experiencing a stalemate, I decided to discuss it and brainstorm with the entire UX team.
SCREENS
* THE FOLLOWING PROJECT WAS CARRIED OUT FOR A FIN-TECH COMPANY RELATED TO INVOICING AND TAX RETURN PROCESSES IN MEXICO, 2018. ALL THE INFORMATION USED IN THE MOCKUPS IS FICTITIOUS.
User Testing
As a final step to verify that the proposals developed met their objectives, we scheduled sessions with a total of 6 counters, where we made a comparison of the platform that was living at that time with the new proposal (prototype in Invision).
After the session, small changes were made, such as adding some missing data and filters; once updated the team gave way to the development of the service.