Context & Background

On Keepa’s platform, financial settlements occur between two entities: the tenant, a company using Keepa’s credit infrastructure to offer installment or credit purchases, and the platform, Keepa itself. Their financial relationship is defined in a contract specifying commissions, fees, and settlement terms. Invoices must be issued periodically based on these rules. Before this module, settlements relied on Excel files and scattered accounting tools, creating errors, manual effort, and frequent disputes.

Problem & stakes

As we deepened research and discovery, several issues became clear:

• Finance teams had to cross-check raw transactions, contract addenda, and past invoices to explain a single number. Mid-cycle contract changes made this even harder.
• Lack of clarity caused mismatches between operational revenue and commissions, requiring manual investigation.
• Tenants often complained of “unclear invoices” in review meetings and kept fallback spreadsheets, questioning most invoices.
• The platform’s support team faced a growing workload to handle tenant inquiries.
• Without a reliable balance view, neither side clearly understood who owed what and why. This slowed reconciliation and increased reliance on manual effort.

The Solution

We designed and delivered a contract-aware invoicing module that acted as a single source of truth:

• Invoice view with a balance indicator and detailed line items, covering commissions (flat, percentage, tiered), VAT, late fees, previous-period debts, penalties for overdue invoices, and refunds credited back to tenants.
• Payment workflow: tenants could submit full or partial payments; the platform then approved and settled them, with a complete history and checks to prevent duplication or over-payment.
• Export options to support reconciliation with external reports when needed.

This approach provided transparency, traceability, and auditability while keeping the interface straightforward.

Outcome & Impact

The module was piloted with 4 tenants over 3–4 months, then expanded gradually before full rollout:

• Both tenants and the platform began relying on system-generated invoices instead of Excel files.
• Finance teams reported a clear drop in disputes over invoice accuracy and source of numbers.
• Support teams saw fewer requests related to invoice issues.
• Settlement cycles between tenants and the platform became shorter.
• Financial report mismatches were reduced, improving trust on both sides.
• The rate of invoice acceptance by tenants increased steadily after launch, as initial resistance decreased over time.

These results confirmed adoption, reduced reconciliation effort, and a meaningful shift from offline to in-system workflows. Although quantitative metrics were not tracked during the pilot, consistent qualitative signals confirmed the module’s effectiveness and adoption.

My Role

As Senior Product Designer, I owned the project end-to-end—from early discovery and hypothesis-driven design, through delivery and pilot rollout. I led user research with finance stakeholders and tenant accounting managers (together with the product manager), structured hypotheses, created prototypes, and validated usability, while ensuring alignment across product, finance, and engineering teams.