Businesses struggle to get a clear picture of their financial health because of fragmented financial data
Businesses use multiple tools (Quickbooks, Bank Accounts, Expense Software, CRM, Stripe, etc) to see the health of their company, creating a disjointed view of the company’s health. Finance teams then build models based on this scattered data, leading to inaccuracies and lots of manual work. This whole process is such a pain that businesses usually employ a full time employee to maintain the model.
User and competitor research
User flow based on technical limitations
To build a MVP I brought together integrations, modeling and reporting into a single cohesive product
Our hypothesis was that combining these 3 features would provide a comprehensive solution to the identified pain points. I validated this idea through user research and clickthrough prototypes with our POC customers.
Modeling
Inline modeling experience
Integrations
Onboarding flow for company setup
Reports
Report builder interactions
I started with the main value prop - Modeling features
Excel formulas are hard to understand and maintain because of the cell based referencing it uses. Since our early adopters were more savvy finance users I chose to go with a low code formula approach after presenting multiple concepts to them. To improve upon the excel experience I added improvements such as name parsing for accounts, time range selection, live value previews, and improved error handling.
Modeling Flow
Modeling iterations and variants
I then built Integrations so that data didn’t have to be imported
Traditionally it took a full time employee a day to manually import data every month from all the tools and it was prone to errors. There were two possible design solutions for this:
One click integration for all accounts
I could have the user pick and choose individual accounts they wanted to integrate.
I chose to go with the user customizable solution so I could build out our data sets for future templates.
Integrating new templates
Integration flow for manually selecting accounts / employees
I then built out Reports as the third value prop
In the past finance teams needed to manage their charts and tables with Excel and anytime new data appeared they would need to reformat. I designed Reports within Basis to make it easy to create budget vs actuals analysis with a quick toggle, quickly create charts by using the same name parsing functionality from modeling, and created the system for the charts themselves.
Report Builder
Bringing Modeling, Integrations, Reporting together for the MVP
By combining the future from the model, and the past from the integrations, I could merge the data to showcase what a business really wanted to see. The user can quickly toggle analysis with views and create charts from any account.
Complete report populated with actuals and projection data
After the initial release I got feedback around collaboration problems
The initial solution solved the pain points but I noticed that the companies that were constantly showing up in our sales cycle were more enterprise leaning. They loved the initial feature set but wouldn’t fully commit to purchasing our product.
I was able to do research with this enterprise segment and discovered:
They were looking for us to solve collaboration problems such as permissions and sharing
Onboarding took too many manual steps to get to value.
I then prioritized these features within our roadmap with engineering and shared initial design concepts with them to get feedback on the technical viability of each option. With the team I was able to create user facing improvements each two week release.
User research post launch
I then built out the collaboration features
Our clients needed a way to manage permissions within Basis so they can share specific parts of the model to stakeholders. To solve for this I had two solutions with their own tradeoffs - page based or view based. After syncing with engineering on the tradeoffs, I ended with the page based solution to get this to users quickly.
Sharing Dialogue
Advanced Permissions
We then closed 3 CFO firms bringing in 500+ clients, and closed 5 large enterprise clients.
I then tracked usage of our product and we maintained 60% Weekly Active User / Monthly Active Users, hitting our goal of being a weekly product.
Testimonials from our clients