Expense Management

The Solution

We kicked off with brainstorming sessions alongside other designers on the QuickBooks Online Advanced team, who already knew the mid-market customer segment well. Together, we reviewed the existing receipt capture experience, shared research and user personas, and identified functionality gaps, potential solutions, and engineering lift.

From there, it was clear we’d need buy-in from multiple product teams to enable the full workflow. We met with each team to align on the vision and gather input.

QuickBooks Time was a mobile app employees used to track hours and submit timesheets for payroll. Because many expenses were reimbursed through payroll, we were able to convince the Time team to enable adding expenses in the app—letting employees snap a receipt or enter an expense alongside their hours.

Additionally, since time tracking only permissions already existed to give employees access through the Time app, we were able to add expenses to that with minimal engineering work.

We added a new tab for expense claims on the expense page. The design was modified from the existing receipt capture design to up-level more of the information managers would need to approve expense claims at a glance. Additionally, we created a settings drawer where managers could easily add or remove employees and create category nicknames employees could choose from that mapped to the company’s Chart of Accounts.

My Role

Because I had previously launched receipt capture with the QuickBooks Online team, I was able to bring the QuickBooks Online Advanced team critical background—research insights, user pain points, and clarity on how the feature worked (e.g., how data was pulled from receipts, how long it typically took, and the most common upload errors). This gave our team a strong head start. I also connected our engineers directly with the receipt capture engineers—a small but vital move in a company as large as Intuit, where just finding the right point of contact can be a project in itself.

During user interviews, I focused on the exact words each user type used to describe their tasks. Employees consistently said “receipt” and “expense,” while managers and admins used terms like “expense claims” and “reimbursements.” Digging in, I uncovered an important nuance: managers saw “expenses” as company-wide, “expense claims” as employee-submitted, and “reimbursements” only when employees needed to be paid back.

Another insight came from how managers and admins wanted to control what employees saw in the Chart of Accounts. Mid-market companies often had extensive, complex lists that overwhelmed employees. From interviews, I built a simplified set of the most common expense claim categories for employees, which we surfaced in a dropdown menu in the QuickBooks Time app. We also added category management, giving admins and finance teams more control over visibility.

The Impact

“My whole team were very excited… the director of finance was jumping up and down: Yeah! It’s coming!”

The beta launch of expense management received overwhelmingly positive user sentiment across follow-up interviews, feedback emails, and anonymous surveys.

Adoption metrics confirmed the impact:

• 93 of 141 invited users joined the beta

• 54 users submitted at least one expense claim

• 745 receipts were uploaded in total

Building on the success of the beta, I partnered with design, engineering, and product teams to refine the experience and launch it in the U.S. market. The rollout was successful enough that the solution was later adapted by QuickBooks Online Advanced in Canada.