Spend Management
Track purchases, easily sync with accounting, and manage employee and company spending all within one place
Background
With the rise of virtual payment options increasing in usage for companies, Plate IQ was looking to expand their product suite by adding their every own expense management platform. With already offering options to pay vendors directly with their Bill Pay platform from uploaded invoices, Plate IQ wanted to offer a petty cash virtual card system to their customers currently in the restaurant and hospitality industries. The platform would be connected to the company’s bank account as the funding source as the cards acted like a debt/credit card hybrid.
Kicking Off & Goals
The project began near the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in April 2020, which considering the increase of contactless payment was an ideal time. I worked as the sole designer with a product manager and a small team of 4 engineers in building the product. After partnering with Marqeta to handle as the middleman between us, the bank to issue cards, and the card network (Visa), I started off coming up with basic flows of functionality between myself and my PM for our initial launch. We focused on keeping everything a desktop experience first, like our main invoice management product, considering the tight timeline and limited number of resources. I started by having many discussions of what we could accomplish for our V1 launch, competitive research, and what our goals were for us as a company and the platform.
Goals
Provide an easy way for users to create and request virtual and physical cards for company uses
Be able to sync between the core invoice processing product and this product
Give users the ability to customize card controls (assign GL accounts to cards, add multiple users to a card, set spending limits, etc)
Let users use and edit current cards without trouble
Filter, map, code and export transactions and payments
Provide cashback to high use customers as an incentive
Gain new customers that are not familiar with Plate IQ
Process
Our initial launch however was pushed up to an earlier timeframe to get V1 ready close to Labor Day 2020. In addition to gathering research of competitors, sketching and making wireframes, I also designed the look and feel for our cards (both physical and virtual) that will be used with the platform. Since the cards and basic screens needed to be approved by both the bank (Sutton) and Marqeta (which can take up to 8 weeks) before we could go live, I had to act fast. With the short timeline, I had to trim back my usual process a bit. Instead of relying on current Plate IQ customers, I relied on fellow co-workers as testers throughout the process and even after launch.
Lucky for me, this platform wasn’t just for current and new customers, but also a new tool for us at the company as well, so it was perfect to get instant feedback with about-to-be users. Because of the time crunch, I finished up wireframes for our main screens (Cards, Transactions, Users, and additional views of each), basic flows (card creation, coding a transaction, exporting, using a card, etc) within just over a month. I quickly moved to the UI phase with a small exploration of look and feel options internally, before sending them off for approval to the bank and Marqeta.
Fast forward to Labor Day, after a round or two of changes, shifting of priorities to new customer needs/asks, a new product manager, and another UI update we completed our initial launch of Spend Management. Within the next year, we would add additional functionality and features such as a reimbursement feature, more integrations with other accounting software, a revamp of our dusty mobile app to include some functionality for Spend Management (such as uploading receipts to transactions) and other helpful features.
Our top customers average $80k - $300k of usage each month during March 2021 to Nov 2021, majority of these coming from virtual card use. Our customers range from regional coffee chains, internet ad companies, hospitality, and various restaurant groups large and small.
List of Features & Functionality in the Product
Create a card / Requesting a card (completely customizable)
Edit existing cards
Reimbursements (both single use and mileage at the moment)
Exporting Transactions
Adding New Users
Setup Policies for users, by location, and more
Coding (mapping) transactions for accounting purposes
Link external company cards to the platform (now discontinued)
Setup alerts for fails, spend limits and more
Upload receipts
Export transactions to the invoice management product
Looking Back
There is a lot I am proud of when working on this product, but I also feel the same when it came to missed opportunities. Much of which can be linked to short time frames, not having a stable roadmap, and a lot of unneeded stress. From a product and design perspective, our market research could have been better along with mapping out customer needs. We were quick to react to customer asks, however it also hurt us in the long run. I felt at times that I didn’t have enough time or resources to design features better so we wouldn’t run into issues later down the road, which unfortunately became a common issue. This was also not just an issue for product and design, but also for any back-end fixes the engineering team had to do, whether it included product and design or not. A lot of times, the entire team felt too rushed to think things throughly, which caused headaches for our customer service team down the road.
Besides the troubles, there were a lot of great things to come from Spend, such as the kickoff of our first design system for the company. I designed Spend to look more modern, cleaner, and more delightful than our core invoice management platform, which got rave reviews from both internally and customers alike. It also helped start implementing better design to engineering processes within Plate IQ that did not exist before I came aboard as well. The engineering team knew if there were any questions, concerns, or needed help they could reach out to me without trouble. Spend also introduced a lot of new patterns, such as our “side car” used for Card Details and Transaction Details that were a hit into other parts of the suite of products.
And on a personal note, I know a lot more of the ins and outs of credit card systems than I ever thought. But that’s one of the benefits of getting opportunities to work on products like Spend, pieces of knowledge from this might come up useful in the future. This product also is something I can brag about since this was my main project during the height of the pandemic (dare I say, this might be my pandemic baby?), especially when other platforms this size have a team of designers.