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FloQast
As a Senior Product Designer
Overview
My responsibility as a Senior Product Designer at FloQast was to conduct user research on the reporting journey in accounting, and build a product based off the findings. This includes building roadmaps, wireframes, design tickets, and hand off to engineering.
The Problem
Accountants often spend a lot of time gathering documents to be able to generate a disclosure. These documents are all over the place, meaning they can be hiding in emails, someone's file cabinets, or even as a receipt somewhere on a desk. The most consuming part of gathering this data is organizing it and formatting it to be able to input it into a disclosure document to generate a 10K or 10Q
Gathering Documents
Accountants need to gather documents of all types. Digital and physical.
Waiting On Others
This job has heavy reliance on others to provide files, which can add up time.
Calculating Subtotals
Users need to make sure the numbers add up. These transactions can be thousands.
Create A User Journey
Before starting mock ups, I have to start building a user journey and communicate with the engineers to make sure that we are at the same understanding. This process includes the product manager, engineers, and of course, myself.
Why Does This All Matter?
Time. Time is the essence of morality. Of Life. Of… You get it. We want to be able to help our users gather documents as fast as possible, but there needs to be an intuitive way to do so. Without having the ability to quickly gather the data needed to construct a report, this process can take days.
What is a 10-K and 10-Q?
A Form 10-K is an annual report that provides a comprehensive overview of a company's financial performance, including audited financial statements, management's discussion and analysis, and detailed information about the company's operations. In contrast, a Form 10-Q is a quarterly report that offers unaudited financial statements and updates on the company's financial position for each of the first three fiscal quarters. Both forms are mandated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to ensure transparency and inform investors about the company's financial health.
How is a 10k constructed?
Each subtotal or "Line Item" within the disclosure consists of a calculated total. This can come from bank statements, transaction details, or other forms of transactions.
What is XBRL?
XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a global standard for digital business reporting that enables the efficient and accurate exchange of financial data. This information is used in disclosures to tie data into specific data points or line items.
Example of an XBRL in line
Shown on the right, is an example of an XBRL tag on a disclosure. Each XBRL is unique. And sometimes, there can be thousands.
Our Solution
We had an Idea. An industry breaking idea. We could make information automatically pull data using tags to calculate it in our user interface.
Idea Of Tags
We have an idea where users can tag documents to be able to extract data into a larger doc
Using Google Drive
Tagged documents can be added to Google Drive, and we run an API to search for the tags.
Data Pulled Into Disclosure
Data from the documents are pulled into the disclosure for you using tagging technology.
Another problem arises
There could be thousands of tags. These tags are tedious to enter, and companies pre-IPO will need to enter all relevant tags into their system.
Users on our system would need to add thousands of tags
Public companies would be fine using our platform to import data, but pre-ipo companies will struggle the most. Without having an efficient way to import xbrl tags, we have to find another solution to get them onboard.
Revisit The Drawing Board
After gathering information with our users, we conducted a design sprint. This design sprint includes all stakeholders, and depending on the chosen length of time, we can have the sprint run up to a week. In this instance, we held a design sprint to get everyone in the same room to ideate the problem, how might we's, inspiration, and solutions.
