Future Accounting
MYOB

Accountants manually prepare and disclose clients' financials to government bodies for compliance. This project aimed to automate the process, simplifying complexities, improving efficiency, and generating significant financial savings. 

The Problem

As compliance services become commoditized, businesses are spending less on compliance tasks. Accounting practices must be efficient to remain profitable, but accountants struggle to focus on advisory work due to time spent on manual data entry.

My Role

I was part of a small team of two product designers and two product managers, focused on building a product vision to solve these problems and validate it in the market.

Discovery 

To capture representative data across Australia, we needed a large sample size, considering the various practice types. Given the multiple contributors to the workflow, we planned to engage all potential users through contextual inquiries and interviews for in-depth insights.

With a clear research plan, we visited 20+ accounting practices in one month, validating our hypothesized workflow in collaborative sessions. We gathered key data on pain points, expectations, system limitations, and time on tasks, confirming that improving efficiencies was a universal goal.

Synthesising our data

We captured extensive qualitative data, which we synthesized through affinity mapping. By grouping clues (quotes, observations, etc.) into themes, we identified key insights for each stage of the process. We visualised each practice's journey map, highlighting unique moments, role touchpoints, and an emotional map to reflect customer feelings throughout.

Reflection:

Many aspects of our hypothesized workflow were inaccurate, highlighting the importance of our discovery phase.

Insight: Users prepare workpapers to calculate and reconcile accounts, housing all necessary data for financials and tax. The existing workflow involved accountants using Excel spreadsheets for calculations and manually entering data into compliance documents, resulting in repetitive data entry.

Solution: We reversed this workflow by making the workpaper the data source, automatically flowing into compliance forms, saving accountants significant time.