Provet Project Hero

Provet

Overview

Provet Cloud is a veterinary practice management software. As part of the Finance team my work focused on improving core financial features like invoicing and payment collection. Besides product work, I co-lead the strategy and planning of the Finance roadmap.

What I Did

A key project that we delivered was the rework of credit notes — financial documents that a clinic can give to clients to credit amounts of money. They are used for things like refunding an invoice, or credit an item that is no longer needed.

Credit Notes Statistics

Research — Understanding the Problem

In the case of Provet, credit note were the biggest source of support tickets — about 70% of all financial tickets were related to credit notes. To really address the core issues of this feature, I co-led a round of discovery research. The goal was to uncover gaps in the current workflow, understand how user expect to use credit, and define requirements based on user needs.

Credit Note Workflow - MVP Explorations

Qualitative research

  • Interviewed ~10 customers from different types of clinics, regions and with different level of financial knowledge.
  • Deep dive into support tickets related to credit note. This helped us understand the workarounds user created to "hack" credit notes. It also showed the biggest pain-points (such as refunds).
Credit Note User Story Map - Figma Explorations

Mapped the product

Created a blueprint of the current workflow to find gaps and dependencies. We also created scenarios and a User Story Map to help us define the MVP

What we learned

  • The old workflow was unnecessarily complicated. This caused users to make repeated mistakes that the support team had to then fix.
  • Credit notes did not meet day-to-day needs. As a result users created work-arounds to balance the sheets.
  • Paying out credit did not work. The back-end was not fully integrated with the payment infrastructure, and users could not refund credit as expected.
Design Solution

Design — Credit Note v1.0

After the round of research and explorations, we focused on delivering a design with two key objectives.

Objective 1 — Provide clear focus, reduce the cognitive load.

Creating and using a credit notes requires numerous decisions from the users — decide which items to credit, calculate the amounts of credit and decide how to use the credit. The new design simplifies the process making creating a credit note a two step process instead of expecting users to do everything in one go.

Step 1 Final Design
1
Items are selectable. Once selected the input field become active and user can edit them.
2
User can edit the amounts and unit. We created a little widget that allows users to calculate the amounts in percentage or monetary value.
3
The total at the bottom keeps track of the total credit for context.
Step 1 Wireframe

Objective 1 — Step 1

Step 1 focuses on setting up the credit note. At this stage users need to only think of which items to credit and the amounts for each. As a result the UI is focused on specific task.

Step 2 Final Design
1
At the top of the page the user can see the total value of the credit note.
2
The items are read-only, and the amount of that is credited for each.
3
The total at the bottom of the credit note keeps track of the available, used and remaining credit.
4
After setting up the credit note, two new section appear. One to apply the credit and one for refunding it.
Step 2 Wireframe

Objective 1 — Step 2

After creating the credit note, user expect to be able to use that credit. After finalising the credit note in step 1, the credit note is in read-only mode and the credit note presents options to use the credit.

Objective 2 — Limit Accounting Errors

The second objective of the new credit note workflow is to limit the number of accounting errors the user can make, like crediting an unpaid invoices. One way we achieved this objective was by rethinking how user could use the credit. We created two separate modals, one to apply credit, one to refund it.

Step 1 Final Design
1
Items are selectable. Once selected the input field become active and user can edit them.
2
User can edit the amounts and unit. We created a little widget that allows users to calculate the amounts in percentage or monetary value.
3
The total at the bottom keeps track of the total credit for context.
Step 1 Wireframe

Objective 2 — Apply credit

When applying credit the system would show all the outstanding invoices for the client in question. This user could then apply the credit to one or multiple due invoices in one go. In the old workflow the user had to manually find due invoices in the system and credit them separately one by one.

Step 2 Final Design
1
At the top of the page the user can see the total value of the credit note.
2
The items are read-only, and the amount of that is credited for each.
3
The total at the bottom of the credit note keeps track of the available, used and remaining credit.
4
After setting up the credit note, two new section appear. One to apply the credit and one for refunding it.
Step 2 Wireframe

Objective 2 — Refund credit

If refunding the credit the user could now choose different payment options and refund amounts. This was an important requirement for users, considering the old workflow did not allow refunds at all.

Provet Technical Specifications
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