Material expense reporting

Initial problem

• Material costs comes up in around 20% of the current projects and there is no system in place that allows Vico leads (Freelancer team lead) reporting material expenses without adding the platform fee on top.
• Currently, users need to hack the platform by creating new projects and ask Vicoland support team to reduce platform fee to 0% in order to report material expenses. This requires manual intervention on our side.
• Vico members are not able to add their own material expenses and Vico lead (Freelancer team lead) or Co-lead need to add them, which creates effort on their side.

Intended solution

• Add a functionality for all freelancer roles to be able to upload their material expenses to the platform
• Add functionality for Vico lead / Co-lead to be able to consolidate material expenses into reports and submit them to the client
• Add functionality for clients to be able to review and approve material expenses reports

Business value

• We reduce internal costs by reducing the amount of internal operations expenditure
• By allowing users to charge clients for their material expenses (eg. travel, software, hardware, etc.) we may increase the ease of use of the platform for our users and thus increase platform adherence.
• We improve client experience by reducing confusion through material expense projects

Discovery

To begin with I attend a kickoff meeting with the Head of product where we discuss the requirements, limitations and other questions regarding the feature. I note down my assumptions, questions that I have about the feature and next steps that I should take to validate my assumptions.

I proceed by conducting internal stakeholder and external user interviews using a prepared-in-advance list of questions. Here I’m trying to understand how people operate when they have a material expense to report. I place each insight on a sticky note. After a number of interviews I collect insights into a board.

In order to better understand the challenges I group collected insights into categories…

…and draw some conclusions:

• Required material expense reporting infomration is: title, amount, date, expense proof (eg. receipt), VAT.
• Multiple expenses from different people shoud be easy to combine into a report and share with the client.

User flows are created to illustrate possible flows of different types of users.

Ideation

I started ideating for the most simple flow of a Vico member. Its flow is shortest and straight forward as well as it will incorporate into a Vico lead’s flow later.

After validating first iteration with users I learned that it works fine, only an empty state could be improved. Now I would build on top of that and create a Vico lead’s flow that would also allow creating reports and adding expenses into them as well as submitting reports to the client.

Client can receive a material expense report and review it. If something is not right or missing there is an option to send a message regarding issues. Otherwise client can approve report.