Save Time and Create Tenant Charges in Bulk
Goal
Property Manager’s with a lot of units end up getting a lot of utility bills. Entering a bill was a very manual process in our system. You had to fill out this New Bill form for each individual bill. Our goal was to find a simpler, faster, and more user friendly way to complete this process.
Process
After researching the space, and understanding the problem I led the team through a mob design activity. We had an hour long whiteboard session and walked away with a plan for implementation.
We would build a new page where users could download a CSV template, edit it, and upload it with the bill information.
To release something to beta users quickly we repurposed the existing “Attached Files” component so users could upload the template. We also added the “Download Template” action in the task bar, following standard existing patterns.
This fast iteration helped us get feedback within a week.
We quickly found that users weren’t finding the “Download Template” task, so we moved the task to the main page. We also created a new component to upload files with a larger drag and drop area.
A confirmation step was requested so users could feel more confident creating 100s of bills in bulks.
Final Product
When we walked our first user through this process for their monthly bills they were ecstatic. What previously took someone 3 days now took them 10 minutes.
One customer we worked with while building the feature was so delighted the first time they used it they sent our team cookies as a thank you.
