Benny

Context

Benny wanted to create an accounting app for freelancers & contractors - a tool to help them manage their most pressing financial pain points and save them time & energy.

We ultimately created an accounting app for freelancers that allowed them to connect their business’s bank and credit card accounts to import transactions. They could then label these transactions as “business” or “personal”, resulting in an overview of their business’s income, expenses, & profit (or loss) on a month-by-month basis. The goal was to later expand on this labeled data to show users an estimation of their quarterly taxes and allow them to export their expenses for itemized deductions.

Here is an account on how we used research and interviews to decide what should be prioritized in the app’s MVP release.

01 Tracking Income

The highest priority for the freelancers interviewed was how much money they are bringing in.

20% of the freelancers were not sure how much money they are making every month.

Another 20% of the freelancers said their income is too unstable month-to-month for them to predict.

20% of all the freelancers interviewed said they didn’t know how many months their current holdings will last them.

02 Tracking Expenses

Most (40%) of the freelancers interviewed had “some” to “many” business expenses.

These freelancers do not regularly track them - instead they log them in hour- or day-long chunks.

Despite that, 30% of the freelancers interviewed said that expense tracking is important for itemizing their taxes.

40% of the freelancers had an accountant to organize their expenses for them. Half of those freelancers felt they paid too much for this accountant.

03 Paying Taxes

The majority of the freelancers interviewed (80%) expressed that taxes are difficult for them.

60% of the freelancers paid quarterly taxes. The rest of the freelancers - who paid yearly - did so deliberately, choosing to pay the penalty.

Of those that deliberately paid the penalty, the majority claimed it was worth paying extra to avoid dealing with taxes multiple times a year.

Of the 40% of freelancers who said they had an accountant, half said it was just to avoid errors on their taxes.

01 Time/Manpower

Small team and short (4 month) deadline.

02 Quarterly Tax Estimations Depend on Specific Information

Information needed from the user to make an accurate prediction: all business income, the time frame, all business expenses, the user’s location, and the user’s filing status.

03 Large Amount of Financial Institutions

There are thousands of banks & credit card providers, all with different security measures (security questions, etc.) We don’t know in advance which ones our users will need/want to connect.

01 Account Sign Up & Bank Connection Flows

The highest priority for the freelancers interviewed was how much money they are bringing in.

Clear, secure, with as few steps as possible, to get the user into the product quickly and easily while allowing us to collect our required information from them.

02 Feature: "Banking"

Uses the user’s connected accounts to give the user a summary of the “cash on hand” and “credit liability” they hold at the current moment.

03 Feature: "Ledger"

Show the users their transactions, organized per month, and ask them to categorize them as “business” or “personal”.

Then, displays their income, expenses, and profit/loss for the month, based on those labels.

Lays the framework for quarterly tax estimations by fulfilling some requirements (income, expenses, and time frame.)

Responsibilities

Led the UX architecture, UX and UI design, user testing, and branding; worked closely with a team of two iOS developers to implement.