Spend Management
Bringing a small business spend-management platform to life.
In late 2022 Zip Business was providing small businesses with flexible credit options through a mobile app and web portal.
The company decided to embark on a journey towards its next product horizon, bringing its tens of thousands of small, micro and nano-businesses spend management tools, allowing their employees to purchase supplies and materials through flexible financing.
Zip business partnered up with a large launch partner which drove initial requirements and timelines for the project
The move into spend management was validated extensively and seen as a core need for small, micro and nano-businesses who often had staff running procurement of supplies and purchase orders.
Zip Business would deliver a web app allowing small business owners enrol its employees into accessing and spending the company's flexible credit accounts.
A launch parter in the form of Australia's largest supermarket chain parent: Coles Group helped exact initial requirements and timelines for a phased launch of a brand new product.
Undertaking the monumental task of building a spend management platform from the ground up required several planning sessions and numerous weeks of workshops with the two PM's assigned to the project, along with senior engineers to shake out specific details and requirements.
Customers were divided into profiles based on size and needs.
Phases were planned using JTBD frameworks created by myself and prioritized in working sessions.
The web app itself was planned loosely initially using structured schemas to map out the scaling and extension of features into gradually more and more levels of org complexity (and thus business sizes).
Due to the accomodation of many different user-types, permissions, roll-out phases and eventually subscription tiers, designs needed cater to a multitude of feature-set configurations.
Inherent to the design of the spend management platform was accounting for multiple layers of account types and permissions.
The platform needed to allow a member of an organization to spend, manage the spend of their reports as well as make requests on those they reported to.
Screens were designed in multiple states to ensure page layouts would accomodate and persist across multiple permissions and feature-sets. Phases too were mapped out to eliminate design-debt and help drive development decisions at a UI level.
Compounding the complexity of the system was navigating the sheer number of business types and their organizations of contractors, branches and the financial control of each level. Research uncovered varying terms and jargon used in org design across the specturm of small to nano businesses.
A detailed help centre and help documentation, a glossary and key definitions were strongly considered for future phases of the project.
With Zip Business being a mobile app-centric service, core spend management features and controls also needed to be accessible through the app. For initial phases all functionality was to be included, however the prioritization of features in planned future phases was determined using workshops and scoped out on design files and flows.
Sadly, due to the shifting economic landscape at the time, Zip Business was forced to shut down and work on spend management ceased. As the team disbanded, my final design work for Zip Business was on sunsetting comms and the app death screen.