Managing company credit cards can be challenging, especially when employees accidentally use them for personal expenses. To help with this, we expanded the existing Transaction Review module -which allows admins to define which transactions require review based on rules like team assignments - by introducing a new feature: Company Reimbursements. This new capability lets both admins and cardholders manually flag specific transactions that fall outside company policy, making it easier for employees to reimburse the company for personal charges. The result is a more flexible and transparent review process that gives finance teams greater control.
YEAR
2024
ROLE
Product Designer
SERVICES
User Research
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Visual/UI Design
Design System Contribution
Delivery & Handoff
About the project
The challenge
Organizations struggle with managing private expenses mistakenly charged to company cards. These challenges include:
Accidental private charges: Employees may unintentionally use corporate cards for personal expenses, resulting in a complex reimbursement process.
Receipt tracking difficulties: Admins often chase employees for missing receipts, leading to compliance issues and additional workload.
Policy enforcement: Companies need better tools to handle out-of-policy transactions without complex manual intervention.
The goal was to create a structured solution that simplifies reimbursements, allowing employees to take responsibility for their private transactions with minimal friction.
Research & Implementation
Understanding User Needs
To build an efficient reimbursement system, we gathered insights from finance teams and employees to understand their pain points. Key findings included:
- Users wanted a self-service solution to mark private transactions and reimburse them directly.
- Admins required visibility and control over flagged transactions.
- The system needed to be seamlessly integrated into existing workflows to ensure adoption. In our case, the Transaction Review feature was already in place. We simply added the option to include a flag reason to the transaction. If the reason is marked as a private expense, the employee can reimburse it directly through our platform.
User flows
Cardholder/Employee
Phase 1: Manual Initiation of Reimbursements
In the first phase, we introduced:
- The ability for employees to submit personal payment cards via the Cardholder app.
- A new “Private Expense” status for transactions, enabling clear categorization.
- An intuitive reimbursement flow, allowing employees to initiate payments back to the company with ease.
- Admin visibility to track reimbursement statuses and mark expenses as resolved.
Flagging Transactions as Private Expenses
Employees can easily flag a transaction as a private expense. For example, if an employee accidentally uses their company card to pay for a Uber Eats delivery, they can simply open the Cardholder app, navigate to Transactions, find the relevant transaction, and mark it as a Private Expense. They also have the option to add a note explaining the mistake to their employer, ensuring transparency and accountability.
Initiating Reimbursements
As an employee, if you didn’t initiate the reimbursement right after flagging the transaction, no problem, you can do it anytime later by selecting the transaction in the Pliant app and clicking “Initiate Reimbursement.” If your personal card is already added, the payment will go directly to the company, otherwise, you’ll be prompted to add it.
Admin
On the other hand, if you are the Admin of the company, you can also flag an employee’s transaction as a private expense. By simply going to the Admin app, navigating to Transactions, and selecting the relevant transaction, you can mark it as a Private Expense and send a note to the employee. This prompts them to initiate the reimbursement through the Pliant platform, ensuring efficient handling of private transactions.
Results & Impact
Here are the key metrics and insights post-launch:
~ 40 organisations enabled the feature (given the specificity of private card usage, that’s strong interest).
Employee-level metrics: 62 employees completed setup of personal payment method; 57 then used reimbursement, minimal drop-off from intent to action.
Reimbursement funnel: 3-12 reimbursements per week; failure rate about 5% in the last 60 days (and failures were due to outside-UI issues like insufficient funds or card declines).
Peak monthly volume was €506.35; average transaction value €22.06, which confirms that the feature is about trust, transparency and operational hygiene, not huge transactions.
Feedback from finance teams: reduced ad-hoc email chains and manual interventions. Employees reported the experience as intuitive and less stressful.
These results show the solution did what I designed it to: lowered friction for employees, gave visibility and control to finance, and created a base for future expansion.
Looking Ahead
This project wasn’t just a feature, it laid the groundwork for future capabilities: automation of reimbursements, deeper policy-driven workflows (for example auto-flagging based on category, auto-reimbursement where permissible), and tighter integration with other modules of Pliant’s expense platform.
It reinforced a key point for my own practice: Beyond screens and flows, the most powerful design is about reducing uncertainty: for users, for admins, and for the business.
Why It Matters
It converted a messy, human-error process into a clean, accountable, scalable experience. Employees feel confident, finance teams feel in control, and the business gains a system that can grow. As a product designer, redesigning this workflow wasn’t just about making it look good. It was about making people feel confident and supported, even in the realm of finance, where messiness often breeds frustration and invisibility.
Smooth Scroll
This will hide itself!
This will hide itself!
(Pliant) Company Reimbursement
OVERVIEW
Managing company credit cards can be challenging, especially when employees accidentally use them for personal expenses. To help with this, we expanded the existing Transaction Review module -which allows admins to define which transactions require review based on rules like team assignments - by introducing a new feature: Company Reimbursements. This new capability lets both admins and cardholders manually flag specific transactions that fall outside company policy, making it easier for employees to reimburse the company for personal charges. The result is a more flexible and transparent review process that gives finance teams greater control.
YEAR
2024
ROLE
Product Designer
SERVICES
User Research
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Visual/UI Design
Design System Contribution
Delivery & Handoff
About the project
The challenge
Organizations struggle with managing private expenses mistakenly charged to company cards. These challenges include:
Accidental private charges: Employees may unintentionally use corporate cards for personal expenses, resulting in a complex reimbursement process.
Receipt tracking difficulties: Admins often chase employees for missing receipts, leading to compliance issues and additional workload.
Policy enforcement: Companies need better tools to handle out-of-policy transactions without complex manual intervention.
The goal was to create a structured solution that simplifies reimbursements, allowing employees to take responsibility for their private transactions with minimal friction.
Research & Implementation
Understanding User Needs
To build an efficient reimbursement system, we gathered insights from finance teams and employees to understand their pain points. Key findings included:
- Users wanted a self-service solution to mark private transactions and reimburse them directly.
- Admins required visibility and control over flagged transactions.
- The system needed to be seamlessly integrated into existing workflows to ensure adoption. In our case, the Transaction Review feature was already in place. We simply added the option to include a flag reason to the transaction. If the reason is marked as a private expense, the employee can reimburse it directly through our platform.
User flows
Cardholder/Employee
Phase 1: Manual Initiation of Reimbursements
In the first phase, we introduced:
- The ability for employees to submit personal payment cards via the Cardholder app.
- A new “Private Expense” status for transactions, enabling clear categorization.
- An intuitive reimbursement flow, allowing employees to initiate payments back to the company with ease.
- Admin visibility to track reimbursement statuses and mark expenses as resolved.
Flagging Transactions as Private Expenses
Employees can easily flag a transaction as a private expense. For example, if an employee accidentally uses their company card to pay for a Uber Eats delivery, they can simply open the Cardholder app, navigate to Transactions, find the relevant transaction, and mark it as a Private Expense. They also have the option to add a note explaining the mistake to their employer, ensuring transparency and accountability.
Initiating Reimbursements
As an employee, if you didn’t initiate the reimbursement right after flagging the transaction, no problem, you can do it anytime later by selecting the transaction in the Pliant app and clicking “Initiate Reimbursement.” If your personal card is already added, the payment will go directly to the company, otherwise, you’ll be prompted to add it.
Admin
On the other hand, if you are the Admin of the company, you can also flag an employee’s transaction as a private expense. By simply going to the Admin app, navigating to Transactions, and selecting the relevant transaction, you can mark it as a Private Expense and send a note to the employee. This prompts them to initiate the reimbursement through the Pliant platform, ensuring efficient handling of private transactions.
Results & Impact
Here are the key metrics and insights post-launch:
~ 40 organisations enabled the feature (given the specificity of private card usage, that’s strong interest).
Employee-level metrics: 62 employees completed setup of personal payment method; 57 then used reimbursement, minimal drop-off from intent to action.
Reimbursement funnel: 3-12 reimbursements per week; failure rate about 5% in the last 60 days (and failures were due to outside-UI issues like insufficient funds or card declines).
Peak monthly volume was €506.35; average transaction value €22.06, which confirms that the feature is about trust, transparency and operational hygiene, not huge transactions.
Feedback from finance teams: reduced ad-hoc email chains and manual interventions. Employees reported the experience as intuitive and less stressful.
These results show the solution did what I designed it to: lowered friction for employees, gave visibility and control to finance, and created a base for future expansion.
Looking Ahead
This project wasn’t just a feature, it laid the groundwork for future capabilities: automation of reimbursements, deeper policy-driven workflows (for example auto-flagging based on category, auto-reimbursement where permissible), and tighter integration with other modules of Pliant’s expense platform.
It reinforced a key point for my own practice: Beyond screens and flows, the most powerful design is about reducing uncertainty: for users, for admins, and for the business.
Why It Matters
It converted a messy, human-error process into a clean, accountable, scalable experience. Employees feel confident, finance teams feel in control, and the business gains a system that can grow. As a product designer, redesigning this workflow wasn’t just about making it look good. It was about making people feel confident and supported, even in the realm of finance, where messiness often breeds frustration and invisibility.
Smooth Scroll
This will hide itself!
This will hide itself!
(Pliant) Company Reimbursement
OVERVIEW
Managing company credit cards can be challenging, especially when employees accidentally use them for personal expenses. To help with this, we expanded the existing Transaction Review module -which allows admins to define which transactions require review based on rules like team assignments - by introducing a new feature: Company Reimbursements. This new capability lets both admins and cardholders manually flag specific transactions that fall outside company policy, making it easier for employees to reimburse the company for personal charges. The result is a more flexible and transparent review process that gives finance teams greater control.
YEAR
2024
ROLE
Product Designer
SERVICES
User Research
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Visual/UI Design
Design System Contribution
Delivery & Handoff
About the project
The challenge
Organizations struggle with managing private expenses mistakenly charged to company cards. These challenges include:
Accidental private charges: Employees may unintentionally use corporate cards for personal expenses, resulting in a complex reimbursement process.
Receipt tracking difficulties: Admins often chase employees for missing receipts, leading to compliance issues and additional workload.
Policy enforcement: Companies need better tools to handle out-of-policy transactions without complex manual intervention.
The goal was to create a structured solution that simplifies reimbursements, allowing employees to take responsibility for their private transactions with minimal friction.
Research & Implementation
Understanding User Needs
To build an efficient reimbursement system, we gathered insights from finance teams and employees to understand their pain points. Key findings included:
- Users wanted a self-service solution to mark private transactions and reimburse them directly.
- Admins required visibility and control over flagged transactions.
- The system needed to be seamlessly integrated into existing workflows to ensure adoption. In our case, the Transaction Review feature was already in place. We simply added the option to include a flag reason to the transaction. If the reason is marked as a private expense, the employee can reimburse it directly through our platform.
User flows
Cardholder/Employee
Phase 1: Manual Initiation of Reimbursements
In the first phase, we introduced:
- The ability for employees to submit personal payment cards via the Cardholder app.
- A new “Private Expense” status for transactions, enabling clear categorization.
- An intuitive reimbursement flow, allowing employees to initiate payments back to the company with ease.
- Admin visibility to track reimbursement statuses and mark expenses as resolved.
Flagging Transactions as Private Expenses
Employees can easily flag a transaction as a private expense. For example, if an employee accidentally uses their company card to pay for a Uber Eats delivery, they can simply open the Cardholder app, navigate to Transactions, find the relevant transaction, and mark it as a Private Expense. They also have the option to add a note explaining the mistake to their employer, ensuring transparency and accountability.
Initiating Reimbursements
As an employee, if you didn’t initiate the reimbursement right after flagging the transaction, no problem, you can do it anytime later by selecting the transaction in the Pliant app and clicking “Initiate Reimbursement.” If your personal card is already added, the payment will go directly to the company, otherwise, you’ll be prompted to add it.
Admin
On the other hand, if you are the Admin of the company, you can also flag an employee’s transaction as a private expense. By simply going to the Admin app, navigating to Transactions, and selecting the relevant transaction, you can mark it as a Private Expense and send a note to the employee. This prompts them to initiate the reimbursement through the Pliant platform, ensuring efficient handling of private transactions.
Results & Impact
Here are the key metrics and insights post-launch:
~ 40 organisations enabled the feature (given the specificity of private card usage, that’s strong interest).
Employee-level metrics: 62 employees completed setup of personal payment method; 57 then used reimbursement, minimal drop-off from intent to action.
Reimbursement funnel: 3-12 reimbursements per week; failure rate about 5% in the last 60 days (and failures were due to outside-UI issues like insufficient funds or card declines).
Peak monthly volume was €506.35; average transaction value €22.06, which confirms that the feature is about trust, transparency and operational hygiene, not huge transactions.
Feedback from finance teams: reduced ad-hoc email chains and manual interventions. Employees reported the experience as intuitive and less stressful.
These results show the solution did what I designed it to: lowered friction for employees, gave visibility and control to finance, and created a base for future expansion.
Looking Ahead
This project wasn’t just a feature, it laid the groundwork for future capabilities: automation of reimbursements, deeper policy-driven workflows (for example auto-flagging based on category, auto-reimbursement where permissible), and tighter integration with other modules of Pliant’s expense platform.
It reinforced a key point for my own practice: Beyond screens and flows, the most powerful design is about reducing uncertainty: for users, for admins, and for the business.
Why It Matters
It converted a messy, human-error process into a clean, accountable, scalable experience. Employees feel confident, finance teams feel in control, and the business gains a system that can grow. As a product designer, redesigning this workflow wasn’t just about making it look good. It was about making people feel confident and supported, even in the realm of finance, where messiness often breeds frustration and invisibility.
Smooth Scroll
This will hide itself!
This will hide itself!