business expenses
Overview
Housecall Pro is a SaaS platform that helps service professionals (e.g., plumbers, HVAC, electricians) manage their business, from customer tracking and job scheduling to payments and financial management—all in one place.
Expense Cards allow Pros to make business purchases like materials, fuel, or permit fees. They can order cards for themselves or employees, and fund them via bank transfers or credit card payments within the platform, functioning similarly to credit cards.
Challenge
While Pros appreciated the simplicity of Expense Cards, adoption was slow due to key pain points such as:
• Slow speed of incoming transfers to Expense Card accounts
• Confusion with setting up a minimum balance
• Difficulties reconciling expenses to jobs and accounting
• Lack of notifications for purchase or funding issues
These issues led to lower-than-expected engagement. Our goal was boost adoption by 20% (which we measured by the time it took customers to activate cards and make their first purchase) and increase overall customer spending by 15%.
However, this was complicated by outdated code structures, shifting stakeholder priorities, siloed teams that hindered collaboration, and pressure to rapidly deliver features from leadership.
How might we increase adoption & retention for Pros using Expense Cards?
Users
Compared to the rest of the market, Housecall Pro focuses on service professionals ranging from an owner/operator to one with 2-15+ employees.
We identify Pros by using a set of customer segments to help pin point different pain points and needs depending on the industry. For Expense Cards, majority of our customers are between 2A - 4D segments
Click here to see the customer segments
Role
I collaborated with product manager and engineering and other stakeholders in product marketing and strategy operations to ideate, research, design, and prototype to expand the experience.
My main tasks were:
• Conduct user research
• Competitive research & analysis
• Design & prototype flows and improvements
Screenshots of discovery work
Product Audit
My first task was to do an audit of the current experience. I went through each workflow from signing up and ordering cards to adding funds, noting any pain points or moments of delight along the way. I also dove into previous Figma files, talked to co-workers who worked on Expense Cards prior, and read through other product documents on the company’s wiki space. Basically any company resource I had access to, I saw it out to learn more.
Competitor
Research
Thanks to prior experience, I had a lot of knowledge of the competitive market for expense management products for businesses. From startups like Ramp and Brex to established solutions like American Express Business cards, I knew majority of the offerings and features these competitors offered. I also took advantage of syncing up with co-workers from our Strategy team to learn more what our customers we’re saying and how many are currently using one of these competitors as well.
User
Research
In addition to conducting user interviews during the design and build phases, I leveraged Housecall Pro’s Facebook groups to gather quick feedback. Browsing user comments, posting questions, and engaging in discussions provided direct insights on Expense Cards. I also collaborated with my team to implement instrumentation via Amplitude, ensuring we captured user data across the platform, as many areas initially lacked proper tracking.
Game Plan
After gathering research, analyzing the data and setting up goals, we decided to focus on four areas to drive engagement and adoption. We did this work in phases:
Improving Funding Options
Add more options and flexibility for connecting more bank accounts to fund with
Expand Notifications
Include account notifications to include declines, low balance, insufficient funds, and more
Redesign Transactions Table
Revamp with better information that can adjust with new functionality as the product grows
Add Receipt Capture
Help Pros track information related to purchases for better reconciliation and job costing
Early explorations for improving funding options
We started off by breaking down our funding issues into two parts:
• Provide more options for Pros to fund their Expense Card account
• Provide ways to make faster incoming transfers from an external account
More funding options
Through customer conversations, we learned that most users funded their accounts via a dedicated business checking account, but some tried using personal or other accounts. Verifying these accounts caused delays, and users were limited to linking one bank account at a time, leading to frustration when they couldn’t fund their accounts quickly.
Customer support also revealed confusion around the minimum balance feature, often requiring an average of four support chats to clarify. With just two months to meet our quarterly goal, I collaborated with stakeholders to quickly iterate solutions. We designed a versatile modal that could be triggered across the Expense Cards section, allowing users to make one-time or recurring transfers, set a minimum balance, and link multiple bank accounts easily.
This approach kept the solution simple for engineering to build, gave users all options in one place, and made it accessible without needing to navigate between pages.
Speeding up transfers
After improving resources for completing transfers, we turned our attention to speeding up transfer times. At the time, it could take up to 4 business days for funds to reach a user’s Expense Card account—potentially disruptive if they didn’t have a minimum balance set up. Collaborating with my product manager and lead engineer, we devised a plan to accelerate funding times for our Pros.
After back-end improvements, we explored solutions used by other fintech products to speed up transfers, while also considering potential monetization strategies. We ultimately tested a flow offering users the choice between accelerated and standard transfers, with the default set to the faster option. A small group of users was included in the initial test to observe their behavior and preferences.
Additionally, we utilized a risk algorithm, managed by our Risk squad, to determine eligibility for accelerated funding, which could vary on a per-transfer basis.
Results
By tracking user behavior with Amplitude, we gained clearer insights into how users were funding their accounts, with more opting for recurring transfers and making one-time transfers from multiple accounts.
For accelerated funding, as anticipated, most users chose the faster option, even if they didn’t actively notice it. In our small test cohort, faster transfer speeds led to a 24% increase in card usage—an excellent result. Since then, we've expanded this feature to all eligible customers and started testing same-day funding monetization with a small fee.
Within the first 9 months of introducing these improvements:
52%
added a recurring transfer (weekly or bi-weekly)
6%
combining recurring transfers with a set minimum balance
24%
card usage thanks to faster transfer speeds with accelerated funding
Expanding
Notifications
Next, we focused on expanding notification options for users. Initially, the only option was a simple toggle on the Transactions page to receive text message notifications for all purchases. Users appreciated these alerts, as they provided a sense of security, allowing them to track employee spending in real time.
However, we noticed a high number of declined transactions that weren’t immediately surfaced to users unless they were logged into their accounts. Declines were often due to insufficient funds or inactive cards. To address this, we decided to improve notifications, enabling users to take action promptly. Drawing from our own card experiences, we built notifications for declined transactions and low balances (set by the user), available via both text and email.
Results
This was a quick win. Shortly after launch, we saw a 33% decrease in declined transactions, as customers became more aware of their balances and activated their Expense Cards upon receipt. Later, we added options for receipt capture as the mobile app expanded with new features.
Previous transaction page, offered no functionality
To enhance transparency for our Pros and prepare for future features, we completely overhauled our transaction table, both on the front and back end. The original table was basic, displaying columns for amount, merchant, location, and category, with limited functionality—only syncing with QuickBooks Online and exporting transactions as a .csv.
After researching and drawing on prior experience, we introduced functionality that allowed users to click on a transaction, minimizing the table and opening a side panel (sidecar). This sidecar displayed additional details and enabled users to add memos, upload receipts, and report issues with a single click. It also laid the groundwork for future features, such as linking transactions to jobs and adding personal categorization.
During the redesign, we also updated the transaction nomenclature to improve clarity and ensure quick, digestible information for users. This involved several discussions about the best wording to enhance transparency. Fortunately, we had time to validate our ideas with five Pros and support specialists, whose feedback—particularly about the memo box—was overwhelmingly positive. With validation in place, we moved into production, though it took several months as engineering needed to clean up and restructure the back end.
New transaction table with sidecar example
Results
The desktop version of the transaction table went live a few months later, followed by a mobile-responsive version. User feedback was very positive. Housecall Pro’s active Facebook groups, used for community building and feedback, saw increased satisfaction, especially with the new sidecar features like receipt capture. Users appreciated how similar the experience felt to other banking platforms, which encouraged many to make their Expense Cards account (later rebranded as HCP Money) their primary business financial account.
This redesign also advanced our mobile experience. At the time, the entire My Money section wasn’t mobile-responsive, but the new designs set up our mobile app team for success. A few months later, they built the transaction table into the Housecall Pro app, allowing users in the field to attach receipts to Expense Card transactions, which could be viewed by office staff in real-time.
We continue to gather feedback for future improvements, such as better filtering, sorting, and bulk actions for reviewing transactions. But overall, feedback confirms that we’re on the right track.
Receipt Capture feature on the transaction’s sidecar. Users can upload up to 5 images and view by clicking on the name
Receipt Capture
Since one of our goals was to provide better ways for users to keep better track of their expenses, we started working on a feature to add receipt images to specific transactions. One of the biggest tasks users have is keeping track of purchases related to which job(s) it was for. Employees would lose receipts, get damaged, forget to hand them in, etc. which made it a challenge for bookkeeping and accuracy.
We first started by allowing users to upload one file (jpg, png or PDF) to a transaction on desktop. Since our mobile app was playing catching up with adding more of the fintech functionality, this paved the way to add the Transactions page in mobile. Users and their employees would now be able to add receipts on the go by taking a photo directly from the mobile app or upload an image from their mobile’s photo library.
Results
Later, we added improvements such as multi-file uploads for a transaction (up to 5) to match our Bill Pay experience and included a memo field. Now users and their employees can document notes about a transaction and upload multiple files for better documentation. One use case we repeatedly heard and saw relates to job costing with the memo field. If an employee goes to pick up supplies, they will usually do it for multiple jobs at once. The memo field allows them to note any specifications such as line items 1,2,4 are for Job X and line 3,5 are for Job Y. This helps business’ reconcile their expenses and gives them more information on job costing overall.
On average, 61 receipts are uploaded per month from our top customers, with the most being close to 400 in a given month (especially during busy seasons).
Future concept for Cards page with a mockup of a virtual card
Outcomes
With these additions in functionality, we saw an increase of 19% each quarter of engaged customers using Expense Cards. 52% of cards total are used each week by our customers and spend an average of $11,561 a month, a 14% increase of spending overall.
Customers are also activating and using their cards faster. Since our GA launch, customers active and swipe their 1st purchase 25% faster than in GA. With an average of 3 cards per organization, we now have over 3,700k active Expense Cards being swiped across the US by our customers. From a little product that started off with very simple basic functions to where it is now, its been a exciting ride to see this grow.
Looking Back
Having previously built a similar product from scratch, I was familiar with the challenges, features, and pain points involved. I recognized an opportunity to leverage my experience and take it to the next level in a different industry. There is significant overlap between the needs of restaurant and hospitality professionals and those of service professionals regarding their daily operations and the problems they face. There remains ample opportunity to enhance Expense Cards further, including features like virtual cards and mobile wallet functionality.
There were times when I had to be scrappy and creative to address the challenges my team and I faced, such as scaling back original ideas due to engineering capacity and the need to update old code for compatibility.
I also had to advocate for improvements and persuade leadership to allow my team the bandwidth to implement them, especially after developing MVP features. For instance, it took over a year to finally implement the memo field in the sidecar, enabling Pros to add notes to transactions for future reference. We frequently encountered pushback on suggestions, were reassigned to higher-priority tasks, or told that we could address improvements later, despite providing supporting evidence.
During this process, I learned to pick and choose my battles and observed how leadership made decisions. By understanding their thought processes, I tailored my presentations and arguments to resonate better with them.
Reflecting on my experiences, there are definitely aspects I would approach differently. First, I would prioritize gaining a comprehensive understanding of our current instrumentation—what we are tracking and what we should be tracking. This was something as we were building features, we realized there was a lot of missing tracking information that would have been helpful earlier.
Additionally, I believe it would be beneficial to design multiple potential final concepts for features with future possibilities. For example, rather than just basic functions like a memo field or categorization in the sidecar, I would explore how these could integrate with accounting categories (GL accounts) or how uploading a receipt could facilitate itemization for job costing. While discussing ideas is important, visually presenting them can have a greater impact on stakeholders.
I am also grateful for the relationships I’ve built with my team and stakeholders, which allow me to brainstorm ideas and gain insights from their perspectives. This collaboration has been invaluable in crafting solutions that facilitate buy-in from others and helps me consider factors such as engineering constraints that I might not have been aware of.
