Inscope
Inscope is a purpose-built software solution for GAAP financial reporting. Inscope automate time-consuming accounting tasks, and reduces manual tasks by 80%. Our AI-assisted workflows help reduce errors and time spent managing internal and audit feedback.
Company:
Inscope (Enterprise SaaS)
Role:
Lead Design and Strategy
Date:
2023-25
My role
As the lead UX/Visual designer, I actively crafted the end-to-end product experience through strategy, concepts, and prototypes. I helped lead research and testing initiatives to validate design decisions. I also crafted the Visual Design language and component library for the the product and brand, and worked closely with a small team of engineers through implementation.
Design system and branding
I crafted a new identity and aesthetic for the brand and product. This included an updated color palette, logo, marketing website and assets. I also built a library of components for the product that were used to update and expand the product experience.
Marketing website
Product Dashboard
Building a purpose-built GAAP reporting tool to automate accounting workflows
The challenge
Changing people’s behaviors
In a lot of ways, this is a brand new solution. We are revolutionizing the financial reporting industry by leveraging modern technologies like AI to reduce the time needed to generate audit-ready reports. One of our biggest challenges we faced is getting people to shift established behaviors. Although existing workflows are largely broken, it is what people are used to and that means a lot; change is hard.
Defining the problems
We took several approaches to capture and develop user empathy, but there is an important fact to note: The two founders of Inscope are the user. They founded the company based on the needs and problems they faced as financial controllers and have deep institutional knowledge.
1. Existing solutions are fragmented
Almost every step of the process is manual and requires using software like Google Docs and MS Word, which aren’t designed to support the workflows accountants expect or need to generate reports.
2. Lengthy and slow feedback cycles
The reporting process has a lot of layers, and that includes getting feedback and alignment from internal stakeholders as well as external auditors. The goal is to file a report with the SEC that is accurate and complete. Unfortunately, that often requires loads of edits and revisions.
3. Reporting requirements are always changing
Every reporting period is different from the last. A company’s financials have changed, new line items have been added to reports, and details about certain transactions or data must be disclosed. Keeping track of all the changes and know how to report them is often a talltale for people drafting the reports.
Outlining key personas
The problem set we were designing for involved a variety of different people and roles. It was essential to understand the key differences between the people who might interact with the product and their motivations. Capturing these details helped ensure we were designing and prioritizing the right problems with the right solutions.
→ Goals/needs
→ Current solutions
→ Challenges/pain points
→ User role
→ Demographic details
→ Motivations
Design, test, iterate.
Conceptualizing the product vision: End-to-end report automation. This prototype was tested with users.
Testing prefomatted tables, linking Excel data and report review (copilot).
Designing key product features
The document editor
Working backwards from the product vision, we crafted a roadmap that prioritized key features that would get customers on the product while working towards the long-term goal: complete reporting automation. The document editor was one of those features. To-date accountants relied on “horizonal” editors like MS Word and Google Docs to draft financials but this introduced a ton of headaches and problems.
Tool bar and drawer compoen
Designing a drawer component to support user needs while keeping document details in view.
Preformatted data tables
“Being able to quickly insert a table that meets filing requirements saves me so much time!”
Helping users ensure data integrity
Accountants rely heavily on Excel to create data workbooks using their ERP reporting data. That data is then manually added to their reports. This behavior is something we didn’t want to change (yet), and we certainly didn’t want to go and recreate Excel. Instead, we decided it was best to leverage Microsoft’s add-on feature and build an integration with our workspace that would keep data synced.
Problem: Data integrity is often lost when generating reports due to the reliance on Excel and existing processes. In other words, accountants take reporting data from an ERP (ie Netsuite) and use it to build data tables for their reports; these Excel files and workbooks are often shared internally and externally, duplicated, edited, causing the source of truth and pivotal information to get lost throughout the lifecycle of drafting.
Solution: Using our preformatted table component and building an integration (add-on) with Microsoft Excel, we can link/sync data between the report workspace and Excel workbooks. This improved data integrity across Excel and the report because changes in Excel can be synced directly to the report workspace.
Reducing draft time with AI
The time it takes accountants to get to draft 0 (the initial draft for the reporting period) was a metric we wanted to reduce almost entirely. Existing processes might require several days to weeks to configure or “roll-forward” a previous report to the new period. Data tables need to be updated to reflect the new period while older periods need to fall off. This included a lot of manual work.
