The confidential information in this case study has been altered.
“ How to ensure the workflow I designed fits the common practice of experts intuitively? “
Background
On the compensation table, channels’ financial operators were required to strictly track the records of cash flows. Also, any manual change made to the records should be reviewed by their managers. Users in this line of work were often rigorous and careful with numbers.
In experts’ common practice, the definition of intuition may not be the same as common users who weren’t in their field. With the attempt of designing a user flow which regular users could use, it may confuse experts even if common users know how to operate it.
Challenge
“ What may add records into the compensation table? ”
Besides the compensation records that were automatically generated by schedules, there was routine financial checking and payment documentation between channels and insurance companies, such as compensation settlement (Monthly) and cashbook reconciliation (Yearly).
In order to gain more understanding of how may this function be used in common practice, I decided to explore how insurance companies plan and review their financial revenue with channels, to dig out more insights into how could this table support them?
Research
“ Numbers will be strictly documented, but they could also be flexibly moved around!? ”
From channels’ perspective, to prevent business disputes with insurance companies, they would have a final check with insurance companies at the end of contracts ensuring that their financial records on the cashbook and compensation table matched companies’ financial records.
However, to insurance companies, the most interesting thing I noticed was, in order to have a good report on the records before they answer the board or investors, compensation expenses could be recognized in different timelines of their yearly revenue review.
It meant that channels’ financial records and insurance companies’ revenue records were allowed to be unmatched sometimes, and the new records could be created into the past records.
Scope
After the market position of the distribution module was redirected to not support traditional channels with sales hierarchy, there wouldn’t be records specifically generated or adjusted for numerous targets in different levels in the compensation table. Then I was working on defining the scope of the compensation table, the most important records to users would be:
1. Automatically generated compensation records from schedules for channels. 2. Manually adjusted financial reports from finance operators for insurers.
And I learned from my survey on the compensation accounting, some record adjustments needed to be processed flexibly, however, catering for all possible financial operations in the compensation table were unpractical on the business and development levels. I scoped in the contexts of possible actions that might be taken on regarding distribution:
Primary 1. To reconcile the yearly financial records (channels & insurers). 2. To settle the monthly compensation records (channels & insurers). Secondary 3. To add budgets for any administrative expense (Often). 4. To add non-monetary overrides for incentive rewards (Sometimes). 5. To deduct the commission as the punishments for made errors (Rare). Tertiary 6. To apply commission caps to channels’ maximum payable amount. 7. To alter the records of false auto-generated records. 8. To chargeback overly claimed covers from the customers channels brought.
The compensation table would only provide the serial documentation on commission records made or generated during the distribution and the exported excel sheets for any further accounting.
New Requirement
“ Records were tied to insurance policies on channels. ”
After my first design one month later, new use cases appeared along the research on policy transfer, which was the commission split from one effective policy under the service of 2 different channels. It happened when:
1. Channels’ contracts end while some customers’ policies were still effective. 2. Channels merged their policies to achieve goals for profit sharing from insurers.
Verification
Originally, I provided 2 ways of record adjustments based on financial incidents that users could define labels to attach to and wrote descriptions, to support all the potentially manual adjustments made to the compensation table, which was:
1. To flexibly add or deduct monetary or non-monetary compensation to or from the records, such as budgets, false records, punishment, and other incidents. 2. To select records within a certain time frame and adjusted their compensation as a whole, such as yearly record reconciliation, commission cap, and override.
And I reached out to a few financial experts in this company and a financial expert from the clients for user testing. During the interview, I mostly wanted to verify the second way of adjustment we provided since it was both complex for the users and developers.
During the interview, I observed their detailed actions and slightly facial expressions carefully, I realized that they often frowned and confused when they used the second method. Most of them mentioned:
“ To reconcile records, I will still use the first method to do them. But knowing what other records were involved in this reconciliation were a good plus though. ”
Mockup
For financial record tracking, operators would track each step of how a financial incident went through with income(+) and outcome(–) as thoroughly as possible.
For record adjustments from an incident that were involved in multiple past records, they would’t adjust the relevant records altogether. Instead, they simply “add a record” to make the total amount on the compensation table right and attached relevant records to these adjustments.
For instance, earned bonuses from 10 policies were changed from 100$ to 90$. They wouldn’t always be edited on their initial recored as 90$. There would be a new record as -10$ tied to their old records.
Reflection
Regarding interviewees, it will be better if we reached out to financial operators who executed tasks first. And then, financial managers who were responsible for reviewing and planning.
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