We learned that tax accountants set up and print many long excel tables to keep track of their deadlines, tasks, and everything involving clients, businesses, and the office. Manually exporting data from various accountancy software seems to be a very common practice.
Accountants and planners have barely a proper overview of what their coworkers are doing, how they keep up with their deadlines, appointments, and how much work they got on their desk.
What can we do to deal with their tried and trusted excel tables and make it easier for them to keep track of proceedings?
We did some desk researches to find competitors in order to learn from them. Our client Business Time Solutions assured that there is no tool or competitor that supports accountants to manage and plan resources nor gives them an overview of what is happening in the office.
Additionally, we planned some time to network and talk to our audience on XING to discuss their current workflow, what software they use currently and how they struggle.
We found out that our remotely relating competitors are DATEV and Agenda. Both companies offer solutions for tax documents, task management, and more, but none of them are specialized in structuring processes, tasks, and resources planning.
Thanks to XING and their groups, we were able to talk to accountants and get an insight into their office management. We participated in discussions about typical inconveniences and doubts when it comes to digitization, workflow improvements, and the paper mess that a lot of them seemed to deal with.
We got in touch with all kinds of people. From tech enthusiasts to the "machines are stealing our jobs!" kind of people. But jokes aside, fortunately, we were able to get a good impression of our audience and portrait the most common traits/findings into one persona.
Johanna is a tax accountant and based in Koblenz, Germany
"It's crucial to be organized and have a perfect overview of tasks and deadlines to maintain trust, reliability and happy clients. I wish the workflow was easier, but changing it could negatively affect the current one and our office could end in chaos."
Johanna has many clients and businesses to take care of. To finish her daily tasks like processing tax matters and advising she needs to stay organized and be in control of deadlines and appointments.
For Johanna, it's important to do a great job, avoid any mistakes and be a reliable coworker and trustworthy accountant to her clients.
Organizing the whole tax office and relying on excel tables are risky if she doesn't check those manually. Facing unpleasant surprises when coworkers are on sick leave isn't rare and messes with her task management and schedule.
When it comes to the development, it was clear to us that we didn't mean to replace the existing competitors for our audience. They don't want to change their whole trusted flow for a new tool. They want to use TTS to organize the files they get out of the current ones. So, importing excel tables, automatically generated tasks, and overviews of resources, such as a warning system would be one of the new essential features at that time.
Usually, we wireframe before the actual development. For this particular project, we always discussed the functions and our developers worked on each feature before designing it visually. With this approach, I was able to test the features like a total tax noob. Pretty effective in this case, since I had to design something foolproof I barely understood.
Initially, I was confronted with unstyled, unstructured, and simply stacked elements during the tests. Before thinking about the visual design, I decided to sketch the structure of components in each feature. That would help me to figure out how to design a user-friendly experience.
After figuring out the layout, I gave each screen a friendlier face. I considered the old design and CD while working on them.
The whole time I've also been somewhat pair programming with our developer to communicate the proper styles. That included reviewing his deliveries and correcting them as sending HTML and CSS snippets back and forth since we didn't have a design system.
