Increase revenue by $3M by designing a new financial tracking system

Build it as a reusable system, not a feature

Early on, it was clear this needed to work across three different products — Project Tracking, Accounting, and Pricebook — as a shared, reusable component. That meant every downstream decision had to hold up across all three surfaces and for every team building on top of it.

Budget Code Setup

The first part of this project was setting up the segments of the Budget Code in settings. Users can first import existing budget codes for faster setup, then manually add any additional segments that are missing.

Creating new Cost Code

Design for flexibility, not a single fixed structure

Budget structure varies across companies and even across projects within the same organization. So there needed to be enough flexibility provided at the Project level to change Budget Code structure as needed.

Budget code structures vary not just company to company, but project to project within the same company. Rather than impose one rigid hierarchy, users needed a system where they could select and reorder which cost segments applied to a given project, giving customers control without adding setup complexity.

Project-specific Budget Code configuration

Navigating a cross-functional trade-off on the core interaction

The budget code selector was the single most-used interaction in the system — reused across 3 products and touching an estimated 10,000 businesses. Two user groups needed fundamentally different things from it: project managers wanted speed and memorized shortcuts, while accountants and other occasional users needed something discoverable.

I worked directly with engineering and our finance/accounting stakeholders to align on an approach that served both — a searchable dropdown supporting direct code entry and full-text search, without fragmenting the experience into two separate tools.

3 product areas utilizing the new selector