Giving Small Business Owners Clarity on Project Profitability

Overview

Small business owners had no reliable way to track project expenses, leading to profitability blindspots and a flood of support calls. Bringing project-level cost tracking into FreshBooks cut support calls by 85% and reached an 80% task success rate in usability testing.

Contribution

Primary Designer, Interaction Design, User Research

Duration

5 months

85%

reduction in support calls

80%

task success rate

users interviewed

Expenses

app.freshbooks.com/expenses

ExpensesMore Actions ⌄New Expense

Tracking a project's cost meant stepping outside FreshBooks entirely.

The gap surfaced downstream. A business owner could see what they'd spent per client, but not per project, so multi-project clients meant hand-matching every line item in a spreadsheet before an invoice could go out.

David, Business owner specialized in web dev

Scenario

David has been working on a website project for his client Kevin and ready to bill the expenses from the project.

Scenario

David is starting on a new website project for his client Kevin

Creation

Create a project in the FreshBooks

Painpoints

None

Scenario

David plans out duration, team members, and services that will go into the project.

Planning

Add team members to the project

Plan out duration for the project

Add all the services that will go into the project

Painpoints

Unable to gather insight on past project performance, so that I can optimize the time, team members, and service cost.

Goals

Quickly find out all the expenses that he spent for the project and bill it back to his client David

Challenges

Can't assign expenses from the projects, so David has to manually enter expenses from projects and calculate the total expenses.

Scenario

Once the project is well planned out, David starts bookkeeping expenses from the project.

Managing

Figure out each service cost

Record the expenses for the project on Spreadsheet

Painpoints

Have to manually add expenses for the project on Excel or Google Sheets.

A lot of moving parts to calculate expenses, such as billing type and service type.

Scenario

When the project nears end, David prepares the paper work, so that he can send the invoice to his client Kevin

Invoicing

Add up all the expenses for the project

Invoice the total expenses for the project to Kevin

Painpoints

Have to refer back to Excel or Google Sheet and cross-reference with FreshBooks to calculate the total expenses.

Managing

Once the project is well planned out, David starts bookkeeping expenses from the project.

1Figure out each service cost

2Record the expenses for the project on Spreadsheet

Painpoints

Have to manually add expenses for the project on Excel or Google Sheets.

A lot of moving parts to calculate expenses, such as billing type and service type.

How might we

Help small business owners track project costs without leaving FreshBooks to do it?

6 → 3 steps

Before6 steps

1Go to Expense page

2Assign to a client

3Go to spreadsheet

4Add a client name for the project

5Add the service cost

6Enter a new project expense

After3 steps

1Create a new project

2Assign the project to expense

3Go to Expense detail page

Optimized the flow for efficient project expense tracking.

The shipped create-expense screen, with the project assigned at the point of entry

The result: expense tracking that lives inside FreshBooks.

Small business owners got a faster, more organized way to track project costs, without leaving FreshBooks.

Key Decisions

Splitting client costs by project took a setting, not a spreadsheet.

Research surfaced a workflow merchants had been doing by hand: breaking a client's costs down by project, expense by expense, outside the product. It wasn't a training gap, it was a missing field, FreshBooks had nowhere to attach a project to an expense, only a client. A reporting view could have summarized costs after the fact, but that would have kept the manual breakdown work in place, just made it easier to audit. I added project-level selection directly into the expense settings instead, giving merchants that granularity at the point of entry. The tradeoff: redesigning the input model rather than shipping a faster reporting layer, a rebuild that couldn't go out until the backend's client-project relationship was resolved.

Before : Manual breakdown in Excel

After: Project-level selection in FreshBooks expense

From manual excel workflow to flexible control in FreshBooks to assign expense to project.

Inline entry beat a separate menu, at a backend cost

Three approaches to assigning a client or project

I tested three ways to bring project context into entry. A settings menu forced back-and-forth; inline-everything slowed the common case. The combined dropdown, approach three, cut the flow from six steps to three, so I shipped it. Cost: the backend couldn't decouple client and project, so the shipped version concatenates them. That same field also fixed existing expenses: correcting one became a click, not a form reopen.

Wireframe

3. Combined dropdown

Resolved client and project in one interaction, cutting the flow from six steps to three.

Mixed result for billable/non-billable checkbox

Usability testing validated the core flow, but sessions split on one detail: once a non-billable option existed, some treated it as essential, others assumed billing was automatic. Without a clean signal to design around, I removed “Mark as Billable” from the first release and defaulted every expense to billable, rather than build a toggle for a use case testing hadn't confirmed. The tradeoff: businesses tracking non-billable costs lose that distinction until a second release, in exchange for a flow every tester completed without hesitation.

Billable expenses, before and after the scope cut.

Billable expenses before the scope cut — Before

Billable expenses after the scope cut — After

Impact

Project-level expense tracking shipped to FreshBooks' project users.

Small business owners adopted the new expense tracking quickly, and support tickets dropped sharply. Most of what remained were requests for the same experience on mobile, a sign the feature was working, not failing.

users adopted the new flow8,000

of 22,000 total project users

project expenses created9,000

through the redesigned flow

reduction in support calls85%

after launch

Key Decisions

Splitting client costs by project took a setting, not a spreadsheet.

Before : Manual breakdown in Excel

After: Project-level selection in FreshBooks expense

From manual excel workflow to flexible control in FreshBooks to assign expense to project.

Inline entry beat a separate menu, at a backend cost

Three approaches to assigning a client or project

Wireframe

3. Combined dropdown

Resolved client and project in one interaction, cutting the flow from six steps to three.

Giving Small Business Owners Clarity on Project Profitability

Tracking a project's cost meant stepping outside FreshBooks entirely.

Key Decisions

Splitting client costs by project took a setting, not a spreadsheet.

Inline entry beat a separate menu, at a backend cost

Three approaches to assigning a client or project

Inline expense entry, inline edit, and the project page.

Mixed result for billable/non-billable checkbox

Billable expenses, before and after the scope cut.

Project-level expense tracking shipped to FreshBooks' project users.

Giving Small Business Owners Clarity on Project Profitability

Tracking a project's cost meant stepping outside FreshBooks entirely.

Key Decisions

Splitting client costs by project took a setting, not a spreadsheet.

Inline entry beat a separate menu, at a backend cost

Three approaches to assigning a client or project

Inline expense entry, inline edit, and the project page.

Mixed result for billable/non-billable checkbox

Billable expenses, before and after the scope cut.

Project-level expense tracking shipped to FreshBooks' project users.