Compliance means each transaction (sale or purchase) must be reported to Tax Authorities to ensure accurate tax calculation and payment. For global businesses, monitoring complex real-time reporting, spotting anomalies, and resolving issues are vital for compliance.
As Lead Designer, I built a product that simplifies Tax Managers’ workflows to report, track, troubleshoot transaction data to stay compliant but also gain strategic insights.
Today, e-Invoicing processes over 24 million transactions monthly, with the value of €26 million for our clients.
Established the product’s front-end architecture.
30+ features and functionalities designed end to end.
Evangelised a user-centric approach in the product development process.
Streamlined client workflows to enhance efficiency, minimised errors, and reduced costs associated with manual processes and compliance risks.
Shifted user behaviour from manual, tactical tasks to automated, strategic processes.
Resource Constraints
Complex and Constantly Changing Regulations
Data Quality Issues
Cryptic Error Messages
User Journey throughout Transaction Life Cycle
Automate knowledge acquisition
Through real-time regulatory updates.
Simplify labor-intensive Data Scoping and Gathering
Via a centralised, customisable data hub helping users find the essential information from vast datasets.
Improve confidence in data
Provide data transparency, ensure clear status visibility, enable flexible queries for in-depth analysis.
Clarify and offer actionable guidance to aid troubleshooting
Empowering users to resolve issues independently and reducing support dependency.
Deliver strategic insights
With aggregated analytics to enhance Tax Managers’ influence in financial discussions
Product's front-end architecture including five key areas (High-level overview of data, Unified data records, Manual data ingestion, Counterparties, Documentation)
A centralised data hub that helps users find information in vast datasets.
Pin point data following users' mental model, apply Progressive Disclosure to reduce cognitive load
Stay Up-to-date with data changes
Easily share information, improving collaboration
Impact on User Workflow
Enable Tax Managers to independently scope and gather data for integrations, reducing engineering dependencies and speeding up market entry and expansion.
Reduced Remote.com's new country integration time from 2 months to 3 hours.
Reduce engineering dependencies from 3 to 1 engineers required on average for each new country integration, speeding up market entry and expansion
Minimise Fonoa’s support needs (2 to 1 Sales engineer per integration)
Strategic Impact
Empowering clients to confidently and quickly enter new markets:
Helped Uber expand to 3 new markets in a month.
Saves clients up to €42,500 p.a (FTE) cost on manual data scoping and gathering costs
Increased Fonoa e-Invoicing’s ARR by 941.67% (July 2022 - August 2024) by leveraging land-and-expand opportunities.
Serves as an essential demo tool, driving commercial opportunities.
A real-time compliance radar that tracks regulatory changes and allows users to receive tailored updates based on their interests.
Allow users to filter updates relevant to their needs, minimising noise and manual monitoring.
Impact on User Workflow
Tax Managers are freed from manual tracking, significantly lowering compliance effort.
Strategic Impact
Transforming compliance monitoring into a background task, keeping users informed without demanding significant time or attention.
The feature evolved into a strategic asset, enabling partnerships with consulting firms by providing a platform that delivers compliance insights to their clients.
Unified transaction records with clear statuses, progress, and errors for deepdive troubleshooting.
Impact on User Workflow
Enables Tax Managers to quickly access and verify transaction data, eliminating time-intensive data monitoring and troubleshooting.
Strategic Impact
Consolidates data in a single view, establishing e-Invoicing as a Single Source of Truth for transaction data, enhancing client confidence in the platform.
Increased product MAU by 16% one month after launch.
Insights enable Tax Managers to proactively monitor compliance health and contribute to strategic financial planning.
Provide high-level actionable insights
Monitor Compliance, highlight issues, provide helpful error messages
Impact on User Workflow
Tax Managers can now quickly assess compliance health at a glance, identifying potential risks without manual data review.
Highlight patterns and trends shifting users’ focus from routine fire-fighting to high-level decision-making.
Strategic Impact
Offers Tax Managers strategic compliance insights, securing a role in key financial discussions.
Elevates the product’s value from a Continuous Transaction Control (CTC) tool to a critical source of strategic insights.
Serves as an essential and effective demo tool, visualising complex integration process, helping unblocking 100% of opportunities in commercial pipeline.
Translate error messages, craft clear, helpful error messages.
Present error analytics clearly, turning error management into a structured, preventable process.
Impact on User Workflow
With actionable error descriptions and analytics, Tax Managers can address compliance errors swiftly and independently, minimizing delays and support dependency.
Strategic Impact
Standardised and improved errors messages across different Tax authorities and languages (+20).
Creates a unified troubleshooting framework share by clients, Fonoa CX, Sales Engineers, Engineering, and Product. This closed-loop approach minimises reporting disruptions and empowers users to resolve issues autonomously.
Error rates decreased by 8.5% one month after launch.
Reduced CX tickets by 12%.
Iterations
Over four years, two primary themes have remained top of mind for Tax Managers: Operational Efficiency and Strategic Value Delivery.
Enhanced flexibility to improve Operational Efficiency
Despite common tasks and goals, each Tax Manager follows a unique workflow, requiring greater personalisations:
Data table customisations to help to prioritise key information within a vast dataset.
Nested filters for robust queries, improving workflow efficiency.
Tailored analytics for multiple workflows
Regardless of their workflows, all data consumers need high-level analytics upfront to grasp the broader context of their processes.
Takeaways
Understanding the Real Cost of Compliance
Client feedback highlighted how vague, cryptic error messages create friction. To address this, we designed the Error Management System to translate, standardise, and clarify errors, offering steps for resolution. This reduced support dependency and empowered users to troubleshoot independently, aligning with our low-effort strategy.