QuickBooks Self-Employed + Amazon Integration

Overview

The QuickBooks Self-Employed + Amazon Buyer integration was a brainchild of the engineering team which came to fruition as a x-functional team effort.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

I’m a self employed/small business user (PJBB - project based business) who uses Amazon for purchases. I’m trying to categorize my Amazon transactions in QuickBooks. But, I don’t always remember what I bought, because the data QuickBook imports from my bank doesn’t show item-level details. Which makes me feel frustrated that I have to go between Amazon and QuickBooks to get the information I need.

Goal

Import Amazon order information into QuickBooks Self-Employed for an easier experience categorizing business transactions. Feed the learnings to the ML model to build a more accurate categorization engine.

The process

In the spirit of moving fast/lean and given that the user need was clear, we spent less time during discovery phase and headed directly into conceptual design phase, followed by validation. Also, this experiment was planned be launched in a labs environment, which would enable accelerated learning and rapid iteration.

Prototyping and validation

1:1 customer interviews with self employed/small business users
Validated our hypothesis and pros/cons of the directional design concepts
We further refined concepts info high fidelity prototypes

Insights

Line item break down doesn’t match bank statement, one transaction = one single entry
One transaction downloads as multiple entries, more the purchases, more the scrolling
Less is more, I’d drill down as needed

Outcome

The deliverable was a integrated native mobile and desktop experience. It was one of the most lean and quickest integrations launched by far within the BU, which included both the launch of both the QBSE labs platform and an inaugural launch of Amazon buyer integration (5,800 signups in a few weeks).

Prototypes

Mobile - https://intuitsbg.invisionapp.com/share/Y9G3W288U7P
Desktop - https://intuitsbg.invisionapp.com/share/NXG9P7WKSF5

MY Role

Design lead - I spearheaded this effort collaborating closely with the x-functional and design team, the latter composed of a visual and content designer.