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Procurify - Create Bill Improvements

Company Overview

Procurify is a spend management company that helps organizations maximize cash flow and accurately track their spending.

 

Using Procurify, our customers can:

  • Request an order, get it approved, and received

  • Ensure the right orders are approved and under budget

  • Ensure orders are purchased and received in a timely manner

  • Create bills for purchased items and pay vendors

Project Overview
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This was identified as a top usability improvement request when looking through responses from NPS detractors.

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I took this on as a design initiative for Q4 of 2021 and I worked on it for about 4 weeks, dedicating 20% of my time. I worked closely with the customer facing team as well as the design team to improve the experience of creating bills in Procurify to help user save time and reduce mistakes in data entry.

The need for a new sharing solution, called Branded Portals came due to an increase in negative feedback on the current way of sharing called Web Galleries negatively affecting retention.

Identifying the Problem
Who is the user?

This impacts Accounts Payable (AP) Clerks who are responsible for making sure an invoice is okay to pay through a process called 3-way matching via:

  • Receiving and processing invoices from vendors

  • Creating and tracking purchase orders

  • Creating a bill to pay for the order while ensuring the information on the invoice, purchase order and packing slips are matching

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AP Clerks are often juggling many things at the same time and since they are the final gatekeepers before money leaves the organization, everything they do is high stakes and they cannot afford to make mistakes.

What is the problem?
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AP Clerks are not able to see all the information they need at once. These problems increase the risk of making data-entry mistakes, which adds friction to AP Clerk’s workflow and jeopardizes the customer’s cash flow.

 

With customers processing about 436 invoices per month with an average of 3 minutes to process per invoice, this is an important issue that impacts the day-to-day operations.

 

I triaged feedback from the NPS score as well as insights from the customer-facing team and identified top 2 problems which I validated through user interviews.

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Problem 1: It’s hard to see information in the uploaded invoice

Problem 2: It’s hard to see information in item table

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Solving these problems would allow AP Clerks to:

  • Reconcile expenses accurately and efficiently while minimizing mistakes

  • Save time processing invoices

Solutions & Iterations
Problem 1
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Many customers expressed frustration that the invoice viewer is too small. Zooming in is not helpful since it AP Clerks cannot quickly scan the information they need, which may be on different parts of the invoice. Even when invoices were readily available in Procurify, users were taking the time to look for the invoice so that they could open it in another window. Having a window open for their invoice and a window for Procurify was a typical set up.

Problem 1 - Solution 1

To address this, I first proposed a solution where users could resize the invoice viewer using a handlebar. So users can expand the invoice panel as much as they need to.  but realized this doesn’t bring any value. When the invoice panel is expanded, the item table has to be minimized and it makes it even harder for users to match the information on the invoice to the purchase order item.

Problem 1 - Solution 2
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So instead, I decided to adopt what our users are already doing and introduced an option to open the invoice in a new window.

Problem 2

The item table automatically populates with items in a purchase order when a purchase order is selected. The details of items in this table are then compared to the details in the invoice.

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There has been feedback on the usability of this table already and there were some measure to address it currently such as:

  • Users can show/hide some columns

  • The invoice viewer panel can be collapsed to maximize the width of the table

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However, many customers didn’t find these helpful especially when they were using the 2 window method. At smaller resolutions, it was not possible to see the item name and item price together, which are the 2 most important pieces of information. AP Clerks had to constantly scroll back and forth. With the average Bill containing 8 items, it was important to provide this information right away to save time and effort.

Problem 2 - Solution 

To address this, I looked into best practices for designing tables on mobile which had similar real estate to what our users were working with. It was important to not only provide all the information AP Clerks need but also the right information which could vary from customer to customer. With this in mind, I proposed:

  • Allow users to show/hide all columns

  • Allow users to can move columns

  • Hover to quick view all line item information

Next Steps

This project had to be de-prioritized but the design team at Procurify is is hoping we can dedicate some time every quarter on UX improvements.

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Finance teams typically have strong influence in contract decision for Procurify so these improvements are important since it will improve the experience of AP Clerks. To push this project forward, in the near future I want to:

  • Involve engineering to discuss tech feasibly and scope estimation

  • Design hifi wireframes so that I can user test with customers. For this project, having hifi wireframes with data similar to what a customer might actually use will be most helpful in seeing if this brings value to customers

  • Work with a Product Manager to see how this could be broken down so that it can be released in smaller pieces

Learnings & Takeaways

When we identified top detractors in the NPS score, I emailed the customers directly, hoping to talk to them as soon as possible. I posted a message in a public Slack message outlining my plan and what I would say in my email. Most customers were okay with this and happy to talk to us. However, there was one user who was particularly unhappy with the product in general and she was not happy that we reached out at all. This led to a discussion between customer success and product where we aligned on how product team members should involve customer success team members before reaching out to customers.

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