Invoicing/Onboarding
fidelity service bureau - products portal

Summary

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We were approached by one of our internal partners to help them with a workflow problem.  They were responsible for maintaining a complex series of rates for each of our client-broker relationships.  Using those rates, they determined how much to invoice each of the brokers.  They were using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of the rates and building assets like rate cards, invoices, and other documents by hand.  It was an incredibly time-consuming manual process, totally un-scalable, and often error-prone because of all the copy-pasting.  And because it was so difficult to track, we averaged a lot of the rates together, leaving sizable amounts of revenue on the table month after month.  

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Working very closely with our partners, I led some design-thinking activites, mapped out the underlying problems, and began to iterate on some designs.  There is a very specific formula we use to derive how much to invoice our brokers, based on our standard client setup.  We came to find out during our design and build phases that not many of our clients actually have standard setups.  

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As we dug deeper, we found exceptions to every "rule" we were given.  All of our invoices were sent as .pdf's, except one broker needed .xlsx.  All of our clients paid monthly, except one client who was on a subscription model and paid yearly.  All of our clients used basis points to determine costs, except one client who used cents per share.  All of our "single ticket" clients paid an extra 3 bps, except one.  What started as a relatively easy design and build challenge was becoming much more difficult.  

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