Intuit QuickBooks
#smallbusiness #accounting #bookkeeping
QuickBooks is an Intuit's suite of accounting, bookkeeping, and financial management software for big and small businesses.
My role: Led the development of 'Workflows,' a core feature within Intuit’s financial management ecosystem (QuickBooks and Intuit Enterprise Suite), designed to automate processes and address the unique operational needs of mid-market businesses.
Workflows
The QuickBooks Workflows feature is a rule-based automation tool available in QuickBooks Online Advanced and the Intuit Enterprise Suite that lets you automate repetitive tasks, reminders, approval processes and more.
The Problem
As our customers' businesses scale, their demand for sophisticated workflow features grows. To increase workflow adoption and usability, we focused on a dual strategy: optimizing existing tools—like parallel approvals and quick email actions—while introducing a smarter, more intuitive workflow builder.
Parallel Approval
QuickBooks supports sequential approvers, where approvals must occur in a predefined order. This enhancement allowed users to define parallel approval steps, where multiple approvers can approve concurrently, and a combination of sequential and parallel approval flows.
KPIs and Success Metrics
Primary: VOCs on parallel approvals/ multiple policies should go to 0.
Secondary: Reduction in time to approve as users can add more approvers now.
Secondary: Increase in adoption of approval workflows.
Track:
a. number of new approval workflows that are getting created with parallel
approvals
b. Number of old approval workflows getting edited to add approval workflows
c. Adoption of approval workflows
Email Approval
QuickBooks and Intuit Enterprise Suite only allowed users (approvers) sign into the product to approve or reject the request. This enhancement helps larger scale business users (often owners and managers) to quickly review and take an action in the email.
KPIs and Success Metrics
Primary: # of usage to approve/reject via email.
Secondary: Reduction in time to approve/reject.
Secondary: Increase in adoption of approval workflows.
The Challenges
When initiator edited the detail information (e.g. Amount), it's challenging to show the most up-to-date information in the email.
The Solution
• Non-numerical edits: Editing text or details will open a confirmation dialog, as the updates may differ from the original email request.
• Numerical edits: Changing numbers or figures is not allowed. To avoid confusion, you must cancel the original request and submit a new one.
Smarter Workflow Builder
A primary pain point for our current users is the significant time and effort required to build workflows. Many users find the process tedious and time-consuming, highlighting the need for a more modern creation experience. To address this, our cross-functional teams collaborated during Global Engineering Days to experiment with new ideas. Please note that the concepts captured below are internal, non-releasable features meant solely for exploration.
The Learning
Our research shows that prospects and QuickBooks users find chat to be the most user-friendly starting point. I've pulled the top use cases from our data repository to build premade selections for rapid prototyping and testing.
While early proof-of-concepts showed that building workflows could be fast and intuitive, we ran into two major roadblocks: technical constraints limited our engineering team to a basic chat-based interface that wasn't an optimal use case, and the rapid rise of AI-native ERP builders demanded support for complex, multi-source workflows. Below is my other builder-experience work for the Intuit Enterprise Suite.
AI-native ERP builder in IES
As technology evolves, product design must adapt to support complex, multi-source automation for mid-market customers. For example, a construction company can now automatically pull permit expiration dates from external online sources to trigger automated reminders inside of Intuit products. To support this advanced level of workflow creation, our team collaborated on a new, intuitive design that makes these powerful capabilities easily consumable for our customers.
While our primary focus remains on the IES ERP builder experience, we also launched a beta test for the "Smarter Workflow Builder" to measure its in-product success, we tested this simplified use case with QuickBooks Advanced users, as well as Elite program members across a few other QuickBooks SKUs.