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Accounting Software / FinTech

Better Client Management for Accountants

Accounting practices needed reliable onboarding and consistent shared client information when external company data, overlapping records and connected products made decisions more complex.

My contribution: discovery and requirements ownership as Senior Solution Designer / Product Owner.

Senior Solution DesignerProduct OwnerProject contribution
Two people reviewing paperwork at a table with a laptop
  • RoleSenior Solution Designer · Product Owner
  • CollaborationCross-functionalGroups shown below are a role map
  • PlatformAccounting client-management product
  • StatusContributedContribution described below

The business challenge

Accounting practices needed reliable onboarding and consistent shared client information when external company data, overlapping records and connected products made decisions more complex.

My contribution

  • Explored accountant workflows and customer pain points.
  • Defined client creation and management requirements for company and individual entities.
  • Worked on Companies House lookup and field-mapping requirements.
  • Analysed duplicate identification, relationships and data validation.
  • Created product requirements, backlog items and acceptance criteria.
  • Collaborated with UX, engineering, QA and product stakeholders.
  • Applied lessons from document-capture customer issues and technical escalations.

The stakeholder perspectives

The problem

Hover or tap a group to see what it needed.

  • Accountants: Reliable onboarding, with one record per client.
  • Product: Recurring support friction turned into product understanding.
  • UX: A workflow designed for repeated accountant use.
  • Engineering: Clear data-mapping and contact-synchronisation requirements.
  • QA: Duplicate rules by entity type to test against.
  • Support: Escalated customer issues investigated.
Decisions

Decisions & trade-offs

  1. Decision

    Balance prefill with accuracy

    Trade-off

    External company information could accelerate onboarding but required validation.

  2. Decision

    Review duplicate evidence carefully

    Trade-off

    Name similarity alone could not safely establish duplicate identity.

  3. Decision

    Consider shared-data dependencies

    Trade-off

    Changes had to account for connected products.

  4. Decision

    Design for maintainability

    Trade-off

    Rules needed to support repeatable accountant workflows.

The solution workflow

Onboarding without duplicates

Illustrative review flow, not a production screenshot or specification. Fictional records and match scores show how a possible duplicate could be reviewed; the source describes duplicate-detection and merge questions, not a verified shipped merge interface.

A company registration number is entered and looked up in a company registry. The found details are compared with an existing record. The match evidence is shown: registration number matches, name is 92 percent similar, address differs. The accountant chooses Merge or Keep separate. Nothing merges automatically. The sample records are fictional.

Entity types explored

  • Company
  • Individual
  • Sole trader
  • Partnership

Solution approach

Client Management design work covered structured client records, entity relationships, external data lookup, duplicate-handling requirements and practical product workflows.

  1. Discover
    • Explore accountant workflows and customer pain points.
  2. Define
    • Client records, entity relationships and external lookup.
  3. Prioritise
    • Create backlog items and acceptance criteria.
  4. Collaborate
    • Work with UX, engineering, QA and product stakeholders.

Business value & evidence

My contribution helped create clearer client-management rules and connect customer needs with product and engineering decisions.

Historical narrative reconstructed from supplied portfolio material. Role boundaries, disclosure permission and source records require confirmation before publication. No independently audited results are implied.

Reported in source material

  • My contribution helped create clearer client-management rules and connect customer needs with product and engineering decisions.

Pending

No invented metrics
  • Individual contribution and sensitive functional detail remain subject to publication review.
  • No additional percentages, ROI, adoption or deployment metrics are claimed.

AI reimagined

Future-State Concept

Accountant Client-Onboarding Copilot

Inputs

Public company dataRecord schemaOnboarding rules

Assistant

Suggests prefill

Outputs

Prefill suggestionsMissing-data promptsMatch explanations

Controls

Deterministic IDs · user-controlled changes

  • An onboarding copilot could suggest fields, explain possible duplicate matches and flag missing information using approved data sources.
  • Creation and merging would remain governed by deterministic rules and user confirmation.

Conceptual enhancement only. Not a claim of AI functionality deployed in the original engagement.

Context, contribution & lessons

The operating constraints behind the decisions, and what I would carry into the next engagement.

Context

Client Management design work covered structured client records, entity relationships, external data lookup, duplicate-handling requirements and practical product workflows.

Challenge & constraints

Accounting practices needed reliable onboarding and consistent shared client information when external company data, overlapping records and connected products made decisions more complex.

  • External company information could accelerate onboarding but required validation.
  • Name similarity alone could not safely establish duplicate identity.
  • Changes had to account for connected products.
  • Rules needed to support repeatable accountant workflows.
What I did
  • Explored accountant workflows and customer pain points.
  • Defined client creation and management requirements for company and individual entities.
  • Worked on Companies House lookup and field-mapping requirements.
  • Analysed duplicate identification, relationships and data validation.
  • Created product requirements, backlog items and acceptance criteria.
  • Collaborated with UX, engineering, QA and product stakeholders.
  • Applied lessons from document-capture customer issues and technical escalations.
Lessons
  • Balance prefill with accuracy.
  • Review duplicate evidence carefully.
  • Consider shared-data dependencies.
  • Design for maintainability.

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