Bookreport
2016-2019
Role: Product Designer
Bookreport is K-12 financial & administrative services and software, that empowers school districts to prioritize spending on what matters most through financial efficiency and transparency. The goal was to make the process easy to use for all faculty: from teachers, to principals, to office staff so that all facets of the school can get their part of the job done easily and efficiently.
I worked freelance for Bookreport, helping design their branding & identity as well as working on product design for many of their more complicated UX problems, including bank reconciliation, budget generation, and HR management tools.
The branding goals were to create a modern palette with an approachable, human atmosphere and plenty of whitespace for the eye to rest and breathe: a design element we wanted to carry throughout the user experience to combat the monotony and clunkiness that many districts had dealt with within spreadsheets and other finance softwares they used previously. With a library of design elements to work from: including logo, color, typography and a playful icon set, as well as a working style guide of UI elements for developers to pull from, a lot of Bookreport was built even without my design guidance every step of the way. This freed up my hours to move forward and help out with an umber of complex UX scenarios.
Spending Reports
I worked on a number of visualizations for Spending Reports, which could be broken down into a number of categories and customized as either bar or pie charts. This helps districts quickly visualize where their money is going to and if their priorities match their spending. There’s also a section to create custom reports and put together any variety of data that a user wants, to visualize the data they need together.
Bank Reconciliation
Bank reconciliation is the process an accountant goes through every month to make sure that what the "books" says the company has in cash makes sense given what the bank account says the company has in cash. Here, this tool inside Bookreport is acting as the “books”, but also pulls in transaction information from the district’s bank account so the accountant can reconcile the data.
Bookreport requested my help with this UX problem, as it’s tricky to make user-friendly and there are a lot of moving parts to keep organized. (And working with Bookreport often involved a lot of complicated accounting information I definitely didn’t understand, turning complicated spreadsheets into something digestible and easy to use.)
We decided to keep the the top menu as minimal as possible so the accountant using it only had the numbers they needed to figure out if they had properly reconciled all the items for the month. For the items themselves, we split the pulled transactions into reconciled and unreconciled items. From there, a user can easily tell which item needs to be reconciled based on which column they fall under (bank or book).
If a user needed to balance an item, we would pull up a modal with the remaining transactions. Because sometimes a transaction could be related to two or more items, we allowed for users to check a number of items that would then be summed up at the bottom of the modal. Once all the items were reconciled, that would be reflected in the top menu, and accountants could submit the reconciliation for approval right through Bookreport.
New Hire Onboarding + Database
Together with Bookreport’s Product Manager, I worked on their new hire onboarding, as well as a system for a Bookreport administrator to create and manage new hires.
For the admin, we created a flow that allowed them to enter in new hire information, setup an offer letter that would be generated by Bookreport (with their school’s branding) and then send that to the hiree. Alongside this, they also needed access to a database with all of the hirees information so that they could go in and make edits, approve required documents or offline tasks (such as employment eligibility forms or background checks), and see what the onboarding status of each employee was. This database also highlights any important steps in the process that become potential blockers for onboarding, such as getting i9 documentation completed.
For the new hires, we designed an onboarding flow that takes them through a number of steps: including entering their information, confirming they read the employee handbook, customizing their tax withholdings, entering direct deposit info and uploading documents for their employment eligibility. After completing their onboarding, they also have access to their profile in the database so they can reupload documents if anything gets rejected.
