Good design is invisible.

Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, said it best:

"Good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible."

Your company's financial system should work the same way, but it doesn't.

The problem with how most companies manage their finances is that they try to shape their operations around the tools they use, rather than the other way around.

The basis of any well-designed financial system starts with the outcome: what does this business actually need to happen, and what tool enables it?

Here's what that looks like in practice:

One of our clients had an issue getting their team to consistently allocate spend by project in their expense management platform. On the surface, it looked like a human problem. A busy team that kept forgetting. But the team wasn't the problem. It was that the system was asking too much of them.

Instead of forcing the team to perform perfectly in an imperfect environment, we asked a different question: how do we achieve accurate allocations even when the team is busy, time is short, and there is zero margin for error?

The answer was to reimagine the process and build it out in a different software, allowing the functionality to operate invisibly. A simple "yes" or "no" question. That was the only question they needed to answer to allocate properly.

Offloading complexity to the "invisibly designed system", not on the team.

The result? Expense allocations went from an average month-over-month close rate of 40% to 100% in the first month.

If your financials are visibly causing issues, the problem is often invisible.