Comptalib

Make accounting simple and automated to make everyday life easier for entrepreneurs.

I joined Comptalib in 2021 to try the challenge with the team to simplify accounting and allow any entrepreneur to do his accounting himself, in particular when they start their activity and they don’t necessarily can afford the cost of an accounting firm. The promise of Comptalib is to transform it to something accessible to anybody through a clear and intuitive interface on a SaaS platform and a mobile app.

As product designer in the startup, ergonomic issues for the user are very important because it helps to reduce the misunderstanding of this complicated domain. Accounting isn’t really easy, but if we fit entrepreneurs needs, we can make it easier to understand specifically in their case. We also had a lot of work to do on the organizational design aspect : the product was very complete and already well advanced, but there had never been any pooling of work on the part of the design team, and no common reflection on the design system and the flow of design from designers to tech. In addition, Comptalib is a platform that welcomes white brands with their own identities and needs, which makes it more complex.

Redesign of the commercial management tool

One of the major subject on our annual roadmap was the redesign of our invoice tool. We allow users to realize the commercial management directly in Comptalib by making invoices, estimates, follow-up of payments and customers… and this is a real asset because linked to an accounting tool that makes the app super powerful.

Because it wasn’t our main feature, we knew that we could improve this part. I had the ability to make a discovery phase and meet all users types : service providers, merchants, shopkeepers, those who were using our commercial management tool and those who weren’t. These research phases were followed by pooling and prioritization with the product manager.

We designed a brand new version of the tool : a better UI to make invoices/estimates, advanced customization of documents, better follow-up features with particularly the ability to send documents by email from the application, automatically link payments to bank transactions…

Making of a design system

To reduce the lack of design organization that was preventing us to design efficiently and with several designers, I had the chance to setup the design system of Comptalib with the help of the front-end developers.

The goal was to create a solution that was efficient both for designers and developers by answering universally issues like consistency, accessibility, and multi-branding.

Comptalib Universal Design System is the technical answer that allows us today for teams to create designs that makes senses and focus in the depth of each problem. For developers, this is the key to keep the product light and easy to maintain. We also set up a flow allowing us to make changes on the design system quickly and deploy it easily to the product.