Helping businesses Manage Employees & Salaries — BillingStall
About Billing stall
BillingStall was a mobile phone application for small and mid-size business owners to do GST, accounting, inventory, banking, and payroll.
Problem
Small business owners have a hard time managing the salaries of their employees,
the process of keeping records on paper is very time-consuming
there is no specific person to do all of that, the owner has to do this on their own
they cannot afford a SAAS product that operates on a laptop/computer to manage employees, cause it increases the friction in regular tasks
Breakdown of the problem
This feature was an initial requirement to help manage employee salaries, but after actually focusing on all the aspects and pain points, talking to users, and realizing that there were many problems the users are facing -
Problem Statement
Design a feature for business owners to help them manage employees’ salaries, users could release the amount easily and improve the overall experience of it.
Exploring Possible Solutions
DESIGN HAUL (Design Decisions)
Let's dive into the solution
Main Dashboard
The process of keeping records on paper is very time-consuming
A dashboard is an approach where users can do all the things from one page.
Salary Due info is shown after a month’s worth of due.
It can help in saving PDFs and can filter out the employees.
The whole thing is that users can pay salaries one by one.
Employee Detail
When you click on the Employee Card from the dashboard It will lead to this page.
The idea was that all the info can be seen about the employee.
Add Staff Form
The necessary details are Name, Salary, and Phone No.
Firstly we thought, going back will save the info, but this is crucial info, so it needed an ACTION to save the information.
Pay Salary Flow
Before paying the Salary, users need to have some clarification on the payment.
Users have control of the amount at any stage.
Add Transaction Flow
Businesses can also add transactions, which will help in keeping a record of the payments which are not done through the app.
Users can also specify, that payment is done by who to whom.
Add Bulk Staff (By CSV)
The user can add staff by adding the CSV file. It’ll reduce the friction.
Certain Pop-up Actions
When the user performs certain actions, the app will let you know some crucial follow-up information.
All transactions and Transaction Detail
Users can see all transactions in one place also, and every payment has its own full details page.
Things I would've done if the feature were designed again
Little Onboarding for this feature alone, so users will not have a hard time understanding it.
Users can fix the advance amount budget for a whole month so that the user will not release an amount more than that.
More thought-out consistency in UI/Visuals.
If we can integrate the attendance of employees, then the app will automatically fill in the absent pay on the payment page.
A specific page to see every month’s expenses in salaries.
Reflection and Takeaways
Don’t jump to solutions or conclusions. First, try to understand the problem.
We can’t directly ask our users what they want, because even they also don’t know that. It’s our job to find out what they want that they don’t know yet.
Testing should not be done after the project is perfectly ready, we have to take chances. Make a no-code prototype and bring it out to test, if it’s not designed properly, iterate on it!
Empathize with your developers and engineers also, make sure you are collaborating with them on every design decision and ask them how they are going to bring this thing to life.
This project was a great opportunity for me to understand what it takes to build something right from the scratch.
Impact
The feature helped in reducing administrative workload by 30%.
BillingStall got acquired by a Fintech Company, one of the reason was this Employee Salary Management Feature.
That’s a wrap folk, Thank you for sticking around till the end!✌️
I really enjoyed my tenure working there. I learned many things and unlearned some stuff also. Many more to come!
Helping businesses Manage Employees & Salaries — BillingStall
About Billing stall
BillingStall was a mobile phone application for small and mid-size business owners to do GST, accounting, inventory, banking, and payroll.
Problem
Small business owners have a hard time managing the salaries of their employees,
the process of keeping records on paper is very time-consuming
there is no specific person to do all of that, the owner has to do this on their own
they cannot afford a SAAS product that operates on a laptop/computer to manage employees, cause it increases the friction in regular tasks
Breakdown of the problem
This feature was an initial requirement to help manage employee salaries, but after actually focusing on all the aspects and pain points, talking to users, and realizing that there were many problems the users are facing -
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Design a feature for business owners to help them manage employees’ salaries, users could release the amount easily and improve the overall experience of it.
Exploring Possible Solutions
DESIGN HAUL (Design Decisions)
Let's dive into the solution
Main Dashboard
The process of keeping records on paper is very time-consuming
A dashboard is an approach where users can do all the things from one page.
Salary Due info is shown after a month’s worth of due.
It can help in saving PDFs and can filter out the employees.
The whole thing is that users can pay salaries one by one.
Employee Detail
When you click on the Employee Card from the dashboard It will lead to this page.
The idea was that all the info can be seen about the employee.
Add Staff Form
The necessary details are Name, Salary, and Phone No.
Firstly we thought, going back will save the info, but this is crucial info, so it needed an ACTION to save the information.
Pay Salary Flow
Before paying the Salary, users need to have some clarification on the payment.
Users have control of the amount at any stage.
Add Transaction Flow
Businesses can also add transactions, which will help in keeping a record of the payments which are not done through the app.
Users can also specify, that payment is done by who to whom.
Add Bulk Staff (By CSV)
The user can add staff by adding the CSV file. It’ll reduce the friction.
Certain Pop-up Actions
When the user performs certain actions, the app will let you know some crucial follow-up information.
All transactions and Transaction Detail
Users can see all transactions in one place also, and every payment has its own full details page.
Things I would've done if the feature were designed again
Little Onboarding for this feature alone, so users will not have a hard time understanding it.
Users can fix the advance amount budget for a whole month so that the user will not release an amount more than that.
More thought-out consistency in UI/Visuals.
If we can integrate the attendance of employees, then the app will automatically fill in the absent pay on the payment page.
A specific page to see every month’s expenses in salaries.
Reflection and Takeaways
Don’t jump to solutions or conclusions. First, try to understand the problem.
We can’t directly ask our users what they want, because even they also don’t know that. It’s our job to find out what they want that they don’t know yet.
Testing should not be done after the project is perfectly ready, we have to take chances. Make a no-code prototype and bring it out to test, if it’s not designed properly, iterate on it!
Empathize with your developers and engineers also, make sure you are collaborating with them on every design decision and ask them how they are going to bring this thing to life.
This project was a great opportunity for me to understand what it takes to build something right from the scratch.
Impact
The feature helped in reducing administrative workload by 30%.
BillingStall got acquired by a Fintech Company, one of the reason was this Employee Salary Management Feature.
That’s a wrap folk, Thank you for sticking around till the end!✌️
I really enjoyed my tenure working there. I learned many things and unlearned some stuff also. Many more to come!