GetPaid: Simplified Invoicing and Billing for small business
A designer’s journey to simplifying business payments.
50% time saved to create and send invoices
30% increase in average time to receive payments
100% user satisfaction
Description
Fincent’s “GetPaid” feature simplifies the invoicing and payment collection process for small businesses.
Designed to streamline billing, track payments, and reduce manual errors,
GetPaid empowers businesses to get paid faster and manage their cash flow with ease.
Situation
Small business owners often struggle with managing invoices, tracking payments, and following up on unpaid bills. Existing processes are either manual or reliant on complex tools that are hard to navigate, leading to cash flow disruptions, delayed payments, and additional overhead costs.
Key Challenges Identified:
Manual Tracking and follow ups: Business owners were tracking payments manually, leading to frequent errors and missed follow-ups.
Delayed Payments: Lack of clear visibility into overdue invoices affected cash flow.
User Frustration: Existing solutions were cumbersome and lacked a seamless user experience.
Task
Defining the goals
Our goal was to design a user-friendly invoicing and payment collection tool that could integrate seamlessly into the Fincent platform, allowing users to:
Easily create and send invoices
Track payment statuses in real time
Automate follow-ups to ensure faster payment collection
Make is Super easy for the customers to pay
Action
Research
User Interviews: Conducted in-depth interviews with bookkeepers, to understand why business owners hate creating invoices in Quickbooks and what are the minimal details required to save invoices and collect payments. What are the challenges faced by business owners to create and manage invoices and payments.
Competitive Analysis: Analyzed 2 core competitors existing invoicing solutions to identify gaps and opportunities.
Understood invoicing system of Quickbooks and what api’s are available to be aware of technical constraints
Design process
Wireframing & Prototyping: Created wireframes and interactive prototypes to visualize the flow of creating, sending, and tracking invoices.
Usability Testing: Conducted multiple rounds of testing with stakeholder and real users to refine the user interface and experience.
Design iterations: Based on feedback, iterated on designs to improve navigation, reduce complexity, and enhance visual clarity.
Unique approach
Clear Visual Dashboard: Designed a dashboard that provides instant visibility into paid, pending, and overdue invoices.
Automation: Introduced automated reminders for unpaid invoices, reducing the need for manual intervention. Enabled schedule payment requests for future dated invoices to there is no need to manually send payment requests.
Personalized User Experience: Integrated features that allow customization of invoices, such as adding logos and personalized messages.
User control: Business owners can modify payment preferences ( choose who pays the payment fee, using what payment methods) while sending the payment request.
Result
Key outcomes
Improved Efficiency: Reduced the time to create and send invoices by 50%.
Increased Payment Speed: Automated reminders resulted in a 30% reduction in the average time to receive payments.
User Satisfaction: Positive feedback from users highlighted the ease of use and the improved cash flow management capabilities.
Visual design & process
Competitors benchmarking
Design iterations
The beautiful GetPaid
Create invoices and send payment requests
Customer experience
Customer feedback, behaviour and insights
It was observed that users were creating invoices in advance and coming back to the system to request payment on due date, resulted in building a feature that allowed users to schedule payment request.
There was a demand for customization options, such as including a company logo on invoices.
Users needed a control over who pays the processing fees, either the sender or the recipient.
Some users used the system to only send requests and preferred settling of invoices outside Fincent, resulting in unpaid invoices staying in Fincent
No. of invoices created & requested between February to May is higher as compared to other months
Learning & Reflection
Gained deep insights into invoices creation and payment collection standards and norms in the USA
Learnt how invoices are created and stored in Quickbooks
Learnt how stripe can be used to receive payment
Conclusion
The GetPaid feature is more than just an invoicing tool — it’s a financial game-changer for small businesses.
By listening to user needs, focusing on simplicity, and automating key pain points,
Fincent’s GetPaid has set a new standard for how businesses manage payments.