Expense Cards
A great way for business owners to manage spending for business expenses with employees inside of a SaaS platform tailored to service professionals
Background
Housecall Pro is a SaaS platform for service professionals aka Pros (think plumbers, HVAC, electricians, etc.) to run their entire business out of. They are able to track customers, jobs, send out estimates and invoices, accept loan offers, manage finances, and more all within one platform.
My role
I started working at Housecall Pro (HCP) at the end of March 2022 as a Sr. Product Designer within the Fintech side of the organization, specially Expense Cards. The goal of Expense Cards was to give Pros (Service professionals such as electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, etc) a way to track their expenses with their employees all within the platform, making it a one stop shop for their entire business. Expense Cards runs off of a financial account (basically a bank account) where money can go in and out with also the security of banking institution without the bank name. Other products similar include Venmo’s debt card and Robinhood’s card product to give you an example.
At HCP, all of the product features work within a squad system that comprises of a product designer, product manager, and engineering lead (the triad), along with supporting engineers. My squad constantly worked with other squads across Fintech and the Core part of the organization as we developed more features within our area, especially as the BaaS (banking as a service) side of the business grew larger.
When I joined in 2022, Expense Cards just formed its own squad to put more effort and focus behind this product. It was still in an alpha state with a small group of users (Pros) but looking for it to go GA (open to all) by end of the year. Since my time at Housecall, the product has evolved further with other banking products & squads by leveraging the financial account into a full experience for Pros to manage their money called HCP Money. At the time of this writing (Spring 2024) HCP Money is still being further developed as a whole with other features and an constantly evolving roadmap.
Starting Off & Goals
When I first started my role, one of the first things I did was take in all the information I could about the entire HCP platform. I took a look at who our user is (the Pro) and their different types of personas. What were the differences between them? What similarities did they all share? How do we in the Product org classify each type of Pro? What is the typical user journey for them like (day to day, week to week, etc)?
I then moved into my product area of Expense Cards. I connected with current leaders in Fintech and the past PM of the squad(my PM joined a week before me, so we landed up exploring things together) to get an understanding of where things were currently. How were things different compared to my previous card management product I just came from? What were the current goals? What functionality was existing? What was the typical user journey like? Any technical considerations to keep in mind? What did current Expense Card Pros (users) think of the product?
Expense Cards was in an alpha state when I came onboard, so between myself and my new PM partner, we saw a lot of opportunities. Many of these opportunities I saw, came from my previous experience at Plate IQ. I knew how small businesses benefited from an expense management product and what features can help with efficiency and transparency with their spending.
At the start of my tenure, Expense Cards had the basics of a very simple transaction table, overview page that showed balance and a graph with who’s spending the most and where, and ability to add funds 2 different ways (external bank transfer or setting a minimum balance that filled from credit card payments accepted within the platform).
Between Fintech leadership and my squad we listed out several goals for the 2nd half of 2022:
Get Expense Cards to GA (open to all) by end of 2022
Increase enrollment by 15%
Increase activation by 10% (Pros that make 10+ transactions within a 45 day period post enrollment)
Increase feature capabilities to make the product more like other fintech competitors
Add additional ways for Pros to fund their account
Reduce tech debt (mostly on engineering, but design also needed a clean up as well)
Process
To achieve our goals, we broke project ideas down in various ways how we can get Expense Cards to a comfortable state to General Availability (GA) and beyond:
Additional & Accelerated Funding
Provide more options for Pros to fund their Expense Card account
Provide ways to make faster incoming transfers from an external account
Better functionality across the product to keep it competitive
Re-design of the Transaction Table to show more transparency
Add features such as Receipt Capture, memo fields, connect to a job
Add functionality to the HCP mobile app for employees to attach receipts on the go and see their transactions
The first project I worked on after joining was to provide ways for additional funding sources into the Expense Card account in 2022.
Additional Funding
First Steps
There were 2 pieces the triad agreed to work on in Q2 of 2022 for additional funding where we could meet our goal. Adding the ability to add a recurring funding schedule from their external bank account into their Expense Card (EC) account and the ability to add another bank account to fund their EC account. At the time, Pros were only able to use one connected bank account with a one time transfer or setup a minimum balance that funds their EC account using credit card payments they take through the Housecall Pro platform. We wanted to give Pros more options so they felt less restricted.
Process
Since we were on a tight time frame with only two months to design and build to hit our OKR for the 2nd quarter, I had to get scrappy. Without time to gather feedback from Pros, I had to rely on my team who’s been there before me. This meant chatting with stakeholders, support staff, and product people who’ve worked on the product before I came. We went through several iterations between stakeholders, myself, my product manager, and engineers to see what we were able to do in our timeframe. We landed up going with a modal that could be triggered in various parts of the Expense Card area that made it versatile so Pros could add funds anywhere in Expense Cards. We were able to put all 3 options of transfers (recurring and one time), setting up a minimum balance, and adding an additional bank account in the modal.
Results
With this new capability, we needed to add a place where Pros could see any schedules (min. balance or recurring transfers) they had setup. They also needed to be able to edit and/or delete the as well. So we added a dedicated Funding page where Pros could do all of that and add funds as well. A fast follow we did land up doing was add a table for Pending One Time Transfers so Pros are able to see all of their transfers in one place. This went live July 2022. Within the first 9 months of adding these options, 52% of all existing Pros using Expense Cards added a recurring transfer (weekly or bi-weekly) and we saw an increase of Pros (approx. 6% total) using a mix of recurring transfers and setting a minimum balance using payments accepted within Housecall Pro.
Next Steps
Tracking Pros movements by using data from Amplitude started to give us a better picture of how Pros were funding their accounts. We started seeing Pros setting up recurring transfers and doing more one-time transfers. However, we also heard a lot of feedback ranging from how slow transfers would take (some up to 4 business days) and confusion on what a minimum balance was.
This gave our triad a few things to consider next. After talking with members of our support team and doing some user research with a few Pros, we knew we wanted to start testing different ways to explain minimum balance better as well as increase Pros to adopt setting a minimum balance. This testing continues into today (Spring 2024).
Regarding the speed of transfers, we already had this project in the works, which would come after a few other improvements soon.
Transaction Table
First Steps
To continue working towards more transparency for our Pros, as well as preparing for the future with new features we might/will add is to update our transaction table. At the time, our transaction table was a basic table. It showed multiple columns listing out information of amount, merchant, location of purchase, and category. The only functionality it had was a sync with Quickbooks Online and the ability to export transactions as a .csv. Since one of our goals is to keep competitive with other fintech products, we wanted to enhance our transaction table to give more information and features that would be beneficial for our Pros. This meant a near overhaul on both the front and backends of the page on engineering and in design.
Process
Doing some research and leaning on prior experiences, we landed up going with functionality that let the Pro click on a separate transaction that let the table minimize with a side panel (sidecar) that showed additional information and allowed Pros to make memo notes, upload a receipt, and report an issue all within a single click.
In the process of also updating not just the design, front-end, and back-end we also had to update our nomenclature in regards to how we display transaction info to our Pros. This meant several discussions on what works best in regards for transparency and quickness of digestible information and how we word things. Thankfully, in this project we had time built in to validate our ideas with several Pros. We landed up interviewing 5 different Pros and support specialists over the design and nomenclature and received a lot of positive feedback. Mostly with the addition of the memo box in each transaction. With validation made, we moved into production for the next several months (since engineering had a lot of things to clean and setup on the back-end).
Results
The desktop version went live May 2023 with a mobile responsive version following right behind. Feedback from our Pros since implementing told us that Pros were very happy with the changes. Housecall Pro has several very active Facebook groups used for building a community within services pros as well as getting user feedback. We saw an increase of satisfaction within Facebook posts and comments of the new transaction table, especially as we increase functionality within the sidecar (like receipt capture). Pros mentioned how similar it feels like to any other banking platform they are familiar with, which gave leverage for Pros to make their Expense Cards account (later rebranding as HCP Money) their primary business financial account.
Next steps
This move also got us closer to a better mobile experience as well, since the entire My Money section in Housecall Pro was not mobile responsive at the time. The new designs also gave us a chance to setup our mobile app team for success as a few months later they would start building the transaction table within the Housecall app. This allowed Pros out in the field to attach receipts to Expense Card transactions, which can be viewed by an office worker at HQ right after it was uploaded.
However, we’re not out of the woods yet. We have a lot of technical restraints to work on that block us from adding search, sort, and filters within the table. By working closely with the rest of the engineering teams across various BaaS squads, myself and product managers were able to find a v0 solution to start off with simple filtering that benefits the user experience and doesn’t give engineering a hard time. We’re looking to release this before summer 2024.
Accelerated Funding
First steps
Like mentioned before, one of the biggest problem points our Pros have with funding their account is the transfer speed. At times it can take up to 4 business days for funds to hit a Pro’s EC account from their external bank account. Of course, this causes a lot of frustration for Pros and has even contributed to churn. So working with my product manager and lead engineer, we came up with a plan to help accelerate funding times for our Pros.
Process
After some fancy work on the back-end, we discussed with stakeholders several possibilities and possible monetary avenues that others in the fintech space are currently doing for faster transfers. We landed up on a flow that would help us test if Pros would select the accelerated funding option vs the standard option with room to monetize it. For this test, we landed up putting into production first to see Pro’s behavior on what they would select (or even notice), despite defaulting to the accelerated option with a small group. Side note: we run a risk algorithm with the Pro and their bank account to determine if they are eligible to do accelerated funding. This can change by a transfer/transfer basis, setup by our Risk squad.
Results
As expected, Pros would choose the accelerated option, whether they noticed it or not. Pros in our small testing cohort noticed the faster transfer speeds and their overall increase of card usage went up about 24%. A great result for what we were looking for. Since then we have expanded our testing cohort, adjusted our algorithm to support more Pros, and decided not to monetize our accelerated funding in the long run. We are now working towards adjusting our flow to not even give Pros the option, but to default the accelerated speed instead (based on the risk algorithm). We’re confident that this will help lead to more Expense Card adoption and later to the rest of the HCP Money features, such as Bill Pay.
Next steps
A current redesign of our Add Funds modal is in process by another squad I am closely collaborating with. In the first iteration of accelerated funding, we chose not to monetize the instant transfers. In the next iteration, we will be including a 1% fee for instant transfers based off the amount they are transferring into their account. All the BaaS squads will be keeping an eye on how our Pros use the feature and iterate from there.
Looking Back
Coming from a product where I built a similar product from scratch, I knew a lot of the challenges, features we could do, pain points, and more. I saw this opportunity to take what I learned and what I could do to the next level in a different industry. There’s a lot of the same overlap between what I did for restaurant & hospitality folks and service professionals in regards of day to day and problems they encounter. There is still a lot of opportunity within Expense Cards to keep leveling up, one being receipt capture which is currently on the way!
In regards to what I want to see improve and the challenges I’ve encountered so far, I feel like this opportunity exposed me to other issues. One of them which is dealing with an ever changing roadmap with stakeholders. There were at times when we (the team and stakeholders) would be aligned on a direction with Expense Cards and improvement of the My Money section. only to have the direction completely shift from stakeholders or uncertainty of what we should do from them. You can imagine that this made the team frustrated, like we were spinning our wheels in the mud, and you would be correct.
Since then, I’ve tried to push for more testing and experimentation if we all agree this is close to a direction we want to go in, but need to learn more. I would also want to make sure we did some different ideation workshops together to help nail down the problems we want to solve. This would help keep us focused on the problem at hand and not drag or shift other problems around, which unfortunately a frequent issue. It would also make us more efficient in brainstorming and developing new features for our Pros.