Accounting tool | 2023
Designing a simplified accounting application for small entrepreneurs in India
I led the design of Hisab, a user-friendly accounting platform tailored for micro and small scale businesses in India. The goal was simple: make accounting accessible for entrepreneurs of smaller scale, who aren’t finance experts.
Hisab is not a feature rich application. Instead, our approach was to bring simplicity and clarity to a space traditionally cluttered with complexity.
Product
Web App | Mobile App
Skills
Product Design
Stakeholder Management
Interactive prototyping
Testing
My Role
Design Lead
Team
Designer, PM, BA, SDE
Why Hisab?
You might be wondering what is the relevance of Hisab when we have many off the shelf accounting solutions in the market.
The ground reality is different. Nearly 60% of small businesses in India use traditional or offline accounting methods (source:2022 Razorpay report). The major factor contributing to this is the absence of an alternate solution that is simple enough for these entrepreneurs to learn quickly and easily.
The existing tools in the market are filled with features that they don't use in their day to day business and jargons that they simple cannot comprehend easily.
Problem
Large share of small business owners in India still rely on tools like Tally, Excel, or even manual ledgers. While these methods work to an extent, they often create bottlenecks in financial management and limit the potential to scale.
Common Pain points
Complexity
Many existing accounting tools are feature-rich, which isn’t necessarily bad. But for micro and small entrepreneurs, most of these features aren’t really useful in running their day to day business.
Traditional Workflows
Traditional tools like Tally or Excel, are not built for modern, mobile-friendly workflows.
Complicated Forms
Forms in traditional tools often include far more input fields than small businesses actually need. This leads to confusion, data entry errors and discourages user from filling them out promptly.
Regional Support
The popular accounting tools in the market do not support regional languages. Since many entrepreneurs are not well-versed in English, this creates a significant gap.
Impact
The new system that my team and I designed was simple - even for a layman with no accounting expertise could use
2 out of every 3 shops we demoed signed up for immediate adoption of our system
Runs smoothly even on low performance, old computers making it more accessible
Regional Language support in the system making it possible even for non english speaking people
Focused dashboards providing clear visibility into key business metrics like receivables, payables, and overall cash flow
Research
User Interviews
Interviewed around 20 small business owners across different industries to study their workflows, frustrations, and expectations from accounting tools.
Landscape Study
Mapped workflows of traditional tools and studied competitors like Tally, ZohoBooks, and QuickBooks
Heuristics Evaluation
Conducted heuristic evaluations of form and table usage to identify usability issues.
Target Users
Our target users include novice users, early adopters as well as senior folks who haven't ventured into digital bookkeeping
User Type
Micro - Small business owners
Annual Revenue between 10lakh - 2 crores
5-200 employees
Operational areas - Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities
Expectations - Younger Personas
Hassle free
Wants to track business from anywhere
Business visibility and easy to manage
Clean Interface and modern
Having time to focus on other things than accounting
An overview of the finance without getting too much involved
Doesn't want to get stuck with accounting and transaction complications, want instant visibility
Expectations - Older Personas
Regional Language Support
Familiar interface as legacy softwares
Less pricing
Solution
Our solution was always focused on a set of high level goals we kept while designing the system.
Goals
Reduce time spent on data entry
Make accounting feel simple and approachable, even for users with no financial background
Ensure mobile accessibility for business owners on the move
Enable easier transition from older systems like Tally and Excel
Support compliance with GST, TDS, and other Indian tax norms
We worked in close collaboration with the client, a team of accounting experts. Their domain knowledge helped us understand the business nitty-gritty and shape the design with continuous feedback and iterations.
CLASSIC, YET MODERN
A design that keeps the trusted, familiar feel of finance tools, but refreshes it with a modern, intuitive look.
Familiar and Simplified IA
Designed around industry standard navigation conventions, making the experience predictable, familiar, and easy to learn.
Aaditya Enterprize
Sales
Purchase
Cash & Bank
Contacts
Product & Services
Accounting
Reports
Help
Deleted Items
Simple, yet delightful experience
Minimal text. Laymen language. Engaging design. Careful and meaningful usage of colours. Every aspect of experience is considered to keep the delightful factor central to the application
Visual Cues
Every module in the application has a contextual representation of it's health. At the time of designing this application- this was never a common practice in accounting applications. Simple but revelatory
Minimal text, more design
Descriptive text is used very minimally in Hisab. Instead, design, colors, icons, logos - all are given priority for better communication
Pin it for special attention
Pinning, while a common-practice across various applications, this wasn't quite common for accounting applications.
Compact Header Design
The menu for 'New' is present universally across the application making it easier to jump in and create an invoice, or a credit bill, or whatever it may be
Focused Dashboard
A detailed and metrics rich dashboard just like in traditional applications, is not what small entrepreneurs need. Instead the attention is given to the statistics that help them with their day to day decisions.
Efficient Forms for speedy work
Forms in Hisab are finalised after taking inputs from our respondents. A detailed form like in other applications, doesn't really apply to businesses of small scale. So we made the decision to remove those, optimising speed.
Video assist for every beginning
Every new user gets a simple video walkthrough on their first visit, ensuring they feel confident and comfortable using the app.
Confidence inducing Bulk Action
Bulk Actions take
Key Takeaways
The team was struggling to scale up their business due to a combination of factors.
High level pain points
Collaboration with engineers
Since the tool involved lot of technical features like 3D Scan, and automated generation of Floorplan, AI enabled
Exposure to a new domain
3D scans of the property is taken using one tool. Communications are over another tool. A different tool for project management. Manual file sharing.
Learn and Repeat
Most of the new jobs are received as email or in excel sheets shared over mail. Co-ordinator has to sit vet through these mails and sheets, and then capture the details and enter it manually in the system to create new jobs