Invoicing

Senior Designer (2019)

An invoice is a time-stamped document that itemizes and records a transaction between a buyer and seller. Beam operates in the B2B sector and invoices businesses for the cost of their employee benefits.

My Role

As a Senior Product Designer, I provided product design and user research for this initiative. Designs included improvements to internal workflows, client experiences, document designs, and email communications. My process included an invoicing audit, user flows, competitor analysis, wireframes, high-fidelity designs, prototypes, and internal training materials. Within research, I assisted with persona creation, user interview facilitation, and usability testing. The team for this initiative included myself as Senior Product Designer, 2 Product Managers, Lead Engineer, and a team of Engineers.

The Challenge

Beam’s invoicing system was originally created at a time when the business had fewer scenarios to support and less accounting principles in place. As the company matured and increased their group and member counts, complexities surfaced that required improvements to financial precision, flexibility, and future-proofing. From a design perspective, we needed to increase the clarity and precision of invoicing data for our clients, extend invoicing capabilities to accommodate larger enterprises with more complex corporate entity structures, and build confidence in Beam’s invoicing process.

Personas

It was important for us to understand our internal and external invoicing customers so that we could design processes and visualizations with their motivations and behaviors in mind. When creating personas, we segmented our customers as internal and external users to ensure we optimized internal processes and data architecture as well as invoice PDF design and delivery. We created five personas to address all user types. External personas included HR and Leadership roles, while internal personas included Accounting, Data Entry, and Client Support roles.

User Research

To better understand user needs and current invoicing pain points, I conducted 11 user interviews with internal and external invoicing clients. I took 3 key takeaways from these interviews. First, Beam's invoice schedule was the primary driver of invoice inaccuracies. Second, data accuracy was the absolute most important characteristic of invoicing as a whole. Third, Beam's invoicing process didn't support payments made via paper check effectively. Beyond these core findings, the interviews presented significant opportunities for improvement across varied perspectives.

Product Design: Client Experience

The external client invoicing experience was improved to better support user needs across web experiences, documents, and emails. Originally limited in content, group invoicing pages were enhanced to include current account balance, payment history, payment preference, and financial status such as delinquency. Within document design, the invoice was updated to include more precise billing data, to support segmented data by subgroups, and to provide additional billing context. A Billing Statement was also created to enable client access to instantaneous billing information. Lastly, emails were redesigned to better support clients with invoice payment instructions and customer support resources.

Product Design: Internal Processes

Internal workflows were updated to support business requirements and improve inefficiencies. UX and UI improvements were made to Beam’s internal invoicing app, specifically its navigation, invoicing data pages, and related internal tools. Through these changes, the visibility of company account balances was improved, internal users could more easily support external clients through features like invoice preview and email, and more process control was established by automating invoice adjustments and sunsetting manual entry.