Making Reimbursement Easy — UX case study

Published in

Bootcamp

10 min readJan 17, 2022

For anyone who’s ever filed a reimbursement form, you know. It’s a time of unparalleled stress. You drop everything to start working on your expense report, only to realize you need all of those receipts from your recent travel. You pull out a shoebox of receipts, then you have to figure out what you did with all those to prove you actually made the purchases you say you did. If you’ve experienced this, you’re not alone.

Let me start with introducing you to the current system

Yeah . . . Frustrating on each level

Employee level

Had to maintain each and every receipt along with the work assigned by the company.
Take out time to Fill out long Excel sheets and forms for reimbursement.

Then, Wait time for reimbursement (Avg. Reimbursement: 21 days).

Manager level

The manager had to review all expenses and match them with the money spent (An extra workload with ongoing responsibilities).

Accounting level

Even after everything is checked and verified at the Manager level, the Accounting team has to reverify all the expenses to make surety for the reimbursement.

User Study

In the user study, I talked with some employees of a small company named VDIS. VDIS is a small design company that makes Signages and billboards and also does implementation for the same, they have clients across the country. I choose this company because they use Reimbursement a lot, as they send their implementation team to many places and handle their expenses.

Persona (Employee)

My convo with him on call (Converted to English)

D : Bhiya, ek case study ke upper kaam kar raha tha to kuchh question puchhne he Reimbursement procedure ko lekar, So abhi kese karte ho app?

(Hello bro, I am working on a case study regarding the Reimbursement procedure and want to ask about the same from you, So How do you do it now?)

T : Wese hi bhai, Pehle saare bill jama karo apne pass aur phir vo lambi wali excel me sab mention karo uske baad agli mahine ki salary me add hoke aa jaata he.

(It’s the same bro. We have to gather all the bills first and then have to fill that Everest excel sheet for Reimbursement, Which get added in the salary of next month)

D : Acha bhiya, Ye bill ko to buhat sambhaal ke rakhna padta hoga nai?

(Oh, It’s such a high-maintenance thing to do, I guess?)

T : Aur nai to kya bhai, Jab tak uska pesa nai mil jaata tab tak wahi pesa hota he, aur sambhaalne ki baat karte ho? kuchh bill to itne bekar paper ke hote he ki ye unka alag level pe dhyan rakhna padta he ki phat na jaye and kuch ka print off ho jaata he kuchh time baad.

(Absolutely it is, The receipts are like money to us until we got the reimbursed amount. Some of the bills are made up of such bad quality paper that we need to take extra care of those and some of them typed with inks that distinguished within time)

D : Bill kho jaaye to?

(What happens in case of the bill gets lost?)

T : To bhai uske liye bolna padta he, usme bhi 10 question hote he ki exact date batao time batao, jaada amount ka bill kho jaaye to bank statement dikhani padti he.

(In such cases we need to pass on the receipt information verbally to the manager which is not a very good thing to do because then we need to get in a more lengthy process for the reimbursement. In some cases we have to show our bank statements as proof)

D : But bhiya ab to PDF mil jaati he buhat jagh na ?

(But nowadays, Bill receipt also generated in the form of PDF which can be stored in mobile?)

T : Haan lekin usse bhi phome me smabhaalna muskil hi he, or usse jaada muskil he jab usse upload karna ho to bill ke sath kunki bill buhat jaada ho jaate he to dhundhna padta he.

(yeah, But it’s also not very easy to maintain, and also it is also a hectic part to upload them with exact bill amount when there’s a lot of bills available)

D : Chalo samjh gya bhiya, Thanks sahre karne ke liye.

(Totally got it, Thanks for sharing such insights)

Pain points

High maintenance of Receipts in both physical as well as digital form.
Filling out long excel sheets or reimbursement forms that require extra focus.
After all the procedures, the waiting time for reimbursement is around a month as it also gets reverified on the management level.

Persona (Manager)

My convo with him on call (Converted to English)

D : Hi, KL Ji, As I discussed before. I want to have a small discussion about reimbursement procedures at your end. So what’s your part in the whole procedure?

KL : Hey, Dinesh. Generally, I provide the reimbursement form to the required employee and check all the expenses they made.

D : Got it. So what is the particular thing you check in the reimbursement forms filed by employees?

KL : I have to match the filed expenses details with the receipts they provided or attached and also if there any false expense is being shown.

D : How much time does this take?

KL : Depends on the list. Generally, a list contains 10–20 expenses and it takes half of hour work, but sometimes when the list is long then it takes 1 hour of time to check the complete list, So I usually do it on weekends or whenever the workload is light.

D : So, It takes some time to go to the accounting team?

KL : Yup, Depends on the workload I have, but normally I do submit these in a week.

D : Got it, Thanks, KL Ji.

Pain points

Need to give this procedure extra time to reverify and match with the expenses
This needs extra focus so that nothing false can go ahead, So that cannot be done with the ongoing tasks.
Checking these forms may take a week to 10 days that makes more addition to the reimbursement of the employee.

Let’s take a look at current solutions or being purposed to be a solution?

Current solution

Currently, companies are using the same traditional way for reimbursements with a little Digi add-on, as Employees are asked to upload PDF of the expense they’ve made.

Drawback

The problem with that is maintaining a PDF on a phone is also not an easy job as you might experience finding a PDF doc and I am taking a scenario where an employee had more than 10 PDFs to find and upload on the portal.

Purposed solution on the internet

During my research for this particular scenario, I’ve gone through some of the case studies that are solving this particular solution, and more or less everybody is talking about the same stuff.

But I also got to know about a solution in which Employees can take a pic of the receipt and the Application automatically store the data of receipt via Artificial intelligence. This is interesting but what happens in the case of the following receipt

Also Camera quality of the phone also plays a major role in this solution and the whole idea of clicking pictures is totally depends upon the camera quality. If pictures aren’t clear then it would be really hard for the AI to get details from the Receipt and as well as it may provide incorrect data, which is not a good idea to proceed with.

Updated Purposed solution by me

During my study of this Purposed solution, I dig it a bit and got a really great idea that would work.

Companies use AI nowadays for screening resumes so that only suitable candidates can qualify and go to the manual screening round. This process made the manual screening load much less efficient. The AI technology used for this process is named CVViZ, Sniper AI, Skeeled, etc. you can get more info. here https://analyticsindiamag.com/top-ai-tools-for-resume-screening/. Under this process, a resume gets parsed and check for suitable word match and same uses for the autofill process in the job form when a resume uploads, So by this we can use the same technology to get data from the receipt when uploaded and filter out the relevant information only.

Relevant data get stored in the form of cards and can be sent to the management whenever an employee wants to send it.

Drawback

This is a great idea and will definitely work but the drawback of this solution is the numerous number of Receipt PDF designs that may be a problematic thing while taking data out from receipt PDF. This problem might include manual corrections from the users. So maybe in some cases users be like:

So, What else can be done?

Now, Introducing Reimbify

Reimbify is software that will be available in both web and app form and will provide a strong solution for this problem.

Let’s start

While my study on this topic, I was continuously thinking of getting rid of dependencies on PDF and Printed receipts, and as a conclusion, I ended up on the idea of getting information about the deduction at the source only. Let me explain.

Inspiration: goDutch App

What is goDutch app?

The goDutch app allows users to record, split and automatically settle group transactions such as rent payments, travel, shopping, dining out, and home delivery

Why it is important?

It is important because goDutch app gave me the idea of tracking the transactions and information about it too So that we can also use the same in our app but first let’s understand how goDutch do it.

So, goDutch tracks your expenses automatically from your SMS inbox with the help of AI assistant Amiri. We always receive an SMS of money deduction whenever we make any payment along with some other information in the SMS. We are gonna be using the same technology for our app Rembify, We’ll track the transactions of the users while they’ll be on reimbursement mode and sums up the amount automatically for reimbursement.

The working of Rembify

We’ll provide two options to our users

Automatic detection of Expenses
Manual selection of Expenses

Automatic detection of Expenses

We are giving a Reimbify mode in our app which will take permissions of the user’s inbox and will track all the transaction messages after that. Users would not have to mark expenses messages manually but this mode will only work on future transactions after enabling the Reimbify mode.

Manual selection of Expenses

I am aware of the scenario that most users would not be comfortable giving inbox permission even though we are promising to keep user data safe, But it’s fine. Being mindful of such cases, I also gave an option to select only relevant messages manually and AI will convert them to the expense cards and further process is fully same.

What I have solved?

No need to maintain any kind of PDF receipt file on the phone or in physical form at the user‘s end.
The message of payment deduction is a strong proof of payment itself, So no need to cross-check the receipts or PDFs by the Manager. This will save a lot of time for the other important tasks at Manager's end.
All the process is crystal clean, So there would be no waiting time for the account team and They can proceed with the reimbursement much faster than before. It’s now fast and much for an efficient process for the Account team.

Other features

Users can track their claim and check the status of the claim too, Along with that they can ping the responsible team if the claim is taking more time than expected.
The manager can Cross verify the transaction on one tap only as all the information about the transaction will be present in the deduction message.
A web portal for the finance team to monitor the expenses of reimbursement with integrated Graphs.