How we design a chatbot to automate accounting process
2023
•
3 mins read
A story of how Ledgerowl came up with a chatbot tool designed to streamline and automate various tasks for finance professional.
2023
•
3 mins read
A story of how Ledgerowl came up with a chatbot tool designed to streamline and automate various tasks for finance professional.
The PEVITA Chatbot is a tool designed to streamline and automate various tasks for finance professional. User could see your financial details of your business such as bank balance, revenue, & profit at the given month. We also provide a summary insight written by our professional expert.
Ledgerowl is a B2B financial technology startup focusing on bookkeeping & tax. At 2021, I joined as the 2nd designer to help them design the initial MVP of the product.
Role
Research, Design, Writing
Timeline
3 months (Q3 2022)
Team
1 Designer, 1 PM, 3 Engineer
Impact
Process time faster by 5X
Highlight
Chatbot Process
General Chatbot
Chatbot Component
Before launching this chatbot, our company is similar to a typical CPA or accounting firm where we provide a bookkeeping and tax service to businesses at Indonesia. The ratio of the EPD team (engineering, product, & design) and operation team was 1:4.
To better understand the accounting process & how the accountant work, we went into deep research for a month. We use several qualitative research method to capture all the insight we could gather. Start by discovering and understanding the current situation by doing:
User interview.
Co-design participatory.
The work of accountant can be classified into 4 big chunks. We found that the most time consuming part is the first 2 phase: data collection & data entry. Why?
Data Collection = The document scattered through different channel and accountant have to sort & check each docs
Data Entry: That is because the accountant should manually input every transaction data to the accounting software, could be hundreds if not thousands everyday.
When we were first presented with this problem, we brainstormed a dozens possibleanswer to tackle this problem but we agree the chatbot should help user upload thenecessary document for accounting process.
Save engineering effort. Getting the right docs help engineering minimize error tremendously, the team estimated it could help them speed up the process by 60%
Integration with accounting software. By uploading the right docs, the chatbot could then process everything & pass along the data to accounting software.
Because each month the accountant follow same checklist, we believe 80% of the process could be faster if the user upload the right document on the right place.
The theme of this project was to find a beautiful expression of accounting. This was quite challenging because accounting, & finance in general, famously known as dull, boring, and formal. Therefore we wanna try to find an elegant way to design this chatbot:
We finally release our chatbot in March 2023 where coincidentally it's the tax season in Indonesia. The rollout was quite successful with over 50% adoption in first roll out.
