Harry Richards
Product Designer
Payable automations
Overview
Designing an account reconciliation experience from the ground up. Using real customer data to create a scalable framework that automated transaction matching against common attributes such as amounts, dates, references and more.
Research
Our analysis of customer data highlighted the complexity of standardising reconciliation rules. Each company had their own specific logic, with multiple attributes that could also involve advanced conditional parameters. We needed to first create a flexible framework that would support customisation for every scenario.
After analysing hundreds of rules we defined a three phase framework to support multiple scenariosAn example using anonmysed data to show the framwork in practiceIn addition, some rules introduced multiple criteria using expressionsAn example of the variation in complexitiy that exisited in some scenarios
Design
Through a series of internal design critiques and user testing we experimented with various layouts - supported with competitor benchmarking. A key objective was to find the right balance between visual diagramming and clear input affordances.
The first idea we explored using horizontal scroll view
We then shifted to looking at more complex virtual diagramming
Surfacing relevant context to each automation was considered essential to follow each step
Outcome
Payable’s initial reconciliation product was created with simple, hardcoded rules. In practice, this typically meant 4 hours of engineering effort to manually add rules for every new customer. Since launching automations, users are creating reconciliation rules in less than 30 minutes, which equals an 8x improvement in speed with zero engineering input.
The final design used for the first release of automations
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