Streamlining Invoice Processing
Finance teams need invoices to be verified by an employee before it can be processed. I helped the Moss team overcome indecision and integrate this step into their platform in a scalable way, enabling satisfaction among high churn-risk customers and contributing to 120% net revenue retention.
My role
As the sole product designer in the cross-functional team. I combined design & systems thinking to define user requirements and drive the team forward in improving the invoice module.
Company
Team
1 Product Manager,
1 Engineering Manager,
2 Engineers
Timeline
6 months for discovery, user testing, design, development & beta testing
The challenge
Primary Goal
Customer satisfaction & retention
Secondary Goal
Quality of in-app experience for the accountant persona
My approach
I strongly believe in a systematic approach of gathering evidence and aligning on goals to make informed decisions and cut time spent on deliberating options.
Improving research quality
While participating in the product team’s ongoing discovery calls, I discovered that stakeholders often had differing opinions because there was no structure nor documentation to enable a shared understanding of of the needs of the target customer.
I worked closely with the PM to lay out the assumptions and what we still needed to know. This helped me create a research plan and documentation system so that we were aligned while speaking to the right customers. I set out to understand the accountant’s invoice workflow:
The steps accountants currently take to process an invoice; the information they need
Obstacles that come up
Their methods for overcoming them
Defining the vision
Option 1: Manual override
Previously, some stakeholders felt strongly for the idea to simply allow accountants to manually override approval rules as they review each invoice, allowing them to select any person they wish -- believing that this would be a quick fix.
Limitations uncovered via user research
❌ Lack of flexibility
My insights from user and subject-matter-expert interviews showed that invoice verification and approvals are very different steps within invoice processing, and the sequence of steps can vary among companies. This is especially important for the target market of larger companies with 100+ employees.
This meant that manual overrides would not be a scalable solution due to the technical limitations in Moss’s monolithic approval ticketing system and conflicts with Moss’ existing pre-approval feature.
In companies requiring approvals AFTER purchase
In companies requiring approvals BEFORE purchase
❌ Bigger workload for target customers
Though manually selecting a person may be adequate for smaller companies where the accountant knows exactly who the invoice belongs to. The target customer has more than 100s of employees, where finding the right person isn’t straightforward. Accountants can make guesses based on invoice details like supplier or cost-center, but may need help from employees to find the right person.
Option 2: Verification as a new step
Introducing invoice verification as a unique step meant that a verifier would be a specific role 1. Users have the option to automate by setting default verifiers based on invoice details. 2. If the customer uses Moss’s purchase request feature, pre-approved Invoices awaiting verification won’t need to be approved again.
✅ No duplicate approvals
Because invoice verification can work asynchronously from approvals, as long as the customer uses Moss’s pre-approval feature, pre-approved invoices that go through verification won’t need to be approved again.
✅ Automation and assistance
Design process
Introducing a whole new step in the accounting experience meant changes to many areas in the app involving both the accountant and the invoice verifier as users.
I started by mapping out the necessary steps for each user to complete in the Moss app.
Defining naming coventions
Since the concepts of “Verification” and “Approval” are very similar, I noticed that during design critiques, stakeholders would often use the more familiar word “approve” when referring to the verification step and the act of verifying. I could see that introducing this new step would be equally confusing to users, so I presented options for naming rules to help us set boundaries and make things easier to understand.
Option 1: “Approve” = step-specific
Option 2: “Approve” = action-specific
➡️ Decision: Option 1
We decided to use the term “approve” or “approval” only when referring to budget approvals because Option 2 would be more expensive, requiring us to rename the existing approval system.
Usability fixes
Internal feedback and user testing in initial designs showed that people had trouble making sense of the fields and widgets where the step is introduced. Upon further fixes, the concept was much more understandable to stakeholders and customers
❌ Before
✅ After
Improvements to design system
Previously, design guidelines required that employees approved/rejected expenses through a dialog component. However, because insights from user research indicated that it was crucial for employees to be able to view the scan of the expense in order to inform the accountant whether changes were necessary, I convinced the team to transition towards the drawer component for these interactions.
❌ Before: Dialogue component
✅ After: Drawer component
A clearer user overview
Allowing invoice verification to be a distinct step in the Moss accounting experience means more transparency for the user. Here, once invoices are pending verification, finance teams can easily see the progress by clicking through the tabs. Under the “Verify” tab, is a table with tailored information for what they need to know. For example, they can see if any invoices are taking longer than they should and send out reminders.
Outcome
Feedback and beta testing has shown extremely positive reactions to the solution. All customers previously blocked by the invoice module were satisfied with our solution. These customers represent a large part of Moss’ 100% SaaS ARR growth and 120% net revenue retention in the past year.
“We've been especially pleased by the team's responsiveness to our product feedback, especially around controlling and accounting. It's refreshing to see the speed at which they continue to deliver a product that fundamentally improves the day-to-day of our finance teams.”
Fritz Cramer / Cosuno GmbH
Project Limitations
Due to practical and technical limitations of the project, we relied mainly on qualitative feedback from customers who were at high risk of churning. Measuring completion of invoice processing was not realistic due to a variety of factors within customer processes.
In the future, I would keep an eye on the following within the target customer segment: Feature-usage rate and average number of times (plus reasons) an invoice is sent back during verification. The next steps would be to figure out more ways to automate verifier selection so as to ease the accountant’s time spent tracking down the correct person.