Invoice Management

Overview

The goal of Globys's flagship product is to minimize invoicing costs by empowering customers to search, access and analyze invoices on demand. By providing a single point of access to all invoices, a customer can consolidate and run reports on select invoices. This in turn allows customers to manage their invoices in a way that helps to reduce errors, surface discrepancies, and increase efficiencies within respective accounting departments.

The Challenge

The application hadn't seen a significant visual update in several years and customers were beginning to take notice. To mitigate the risk imposed by the aging interface, I was brought on to lead the design and help product develop a plan to make updates to the aging application.

Initial Research & Ideation

Understanding the Users

Since this was an existing in-production application, I had the luxury of starting out with some level of research. My first job was to understand the users and validate that current assumptions were still accurate.

Primary users

The vast majority of users work within accounting departments within medium to large enterprises. Specifically, I focused on the following users who covered each step in the review and payment process.

• Accounts Payable Manager: Oversees a team of clerks and supervisors responsible for all accounts payable functions. They are tasked with monitoring the daily operations and making sure spending adheres to budget.
• Accounts Payable Clerk: Responsible for completing payments and controlling expenses by receiving, processing, verifying, and reconciling invoices.
• Accounts Payable – Invoice Validation: For large companies processing thousands of invoices per month, there is a dedicated role or team solely responsible for the validation between purchase orders (PO) and supplier invoices.

All Customer Roles

I revalidated the baseline customer roles but relied on the main enterprise-level roles to inform my design thinking.

Role & Business Segment	Billing Review & Payment Process
	Receive	Consolidate	Validate	Approve	Dispute	Pay	Remit Advice	Post Entry
Owner small	•		•	•	•	•		•
Manager small	•		•		•	•		•
Bookkeeper small		•	•			•		•
Accountant small	•	•	•	•	•	•	•	•
A/P Manager medium––enterprise	•	•	•		•	•	•	•
A/P Clerk medium––enterprise	•	•	•					•
A/P Invoice Validation enterprise			•	•
Service/Vendor Management enterprise		•	•	•
Dept. A/P Manager enterprise		•	•	•	•	•	•	•
Business Manager enterprise		•	•	•
Invoicing Manager enterprise––outsourced	•	•	•
Invdividual Employee small––medium––enterprise			•

The User's Journey

Revalidating the product's navigation gave me a clearer picture of some potential challenges the user might experience trying to get around. I created a complete baseline collection of navigation diagrams to ensure that the team had an accurate reference to begin design efforts.

Design Ideation

After conducting a design review of the existing application, I identified areas where I believed making updates could provide significant positive impact across the system: consolidate items in top-level navigation, provide ability to expand/collapse specific sections, and increase white space for increased readability and aesthetics.

Bootstrap

The use of Bootstrap made sense for several reasons. Many of the largest customers were already using it for their existing products. This in turn would decrease the time for Globys teams to re-brand the application per those customer's own brand requirements. My knowledge and experience with Bootstrap would allow me to better peer-program with engineering to speed development.

Final Designs

The following are a selection of UIs that best represent the visual updates that were implemented.

Home/Dashboard

Statements List

Statement Detail View

Statements Compare

Application Setup

Brand & Style Guidance

Globys' billing product normally integrates into an existing customer portal. Because of this, it's important that those customers know what and how they can change the look of Globys' solution to match their own internal branding guidelines. I created a brand guide to provide an overview of what can be done to support this need.

Logo Design

My goal with this logo was to create something professional looking that also felt real. It was used as a placeholder during design and development as well in presentation material. It would eventually be replaced with the customer's logo.