What if accountants had a direct, dedicated channel to communicate with their clients?
What if they were able to help their clients grow by giving SMEs the right advice at the right time?
Visionplanner is a software company with employees in Veenendaal, the Netherlands, and Hyderabad India, who make products for Dutch accountants. Visionplanner is driven by the need to provide Dutch SMEs the best advice to grow their business. The accountants are in the best position to provide this advice.
Hence, Visionplanner creates the products which help accountants provide the best advice to the SMEs. As Visionplanner CEO likes to say it, accountants are the ‘kracht achter the MKB’, or, ‘accountants are the power behind the SMEs'.
Better financial advice needs better financial data. During day to day operations, entrepreneurs generate financial data, and based on this data, accountants provide them the best advice for their business. But if the data sharing process is broken, the accountants are powerless. To give real-time advice, accountants need monthly or quarterly data from their clients. However, most clients only provide the data annually, when it is time to submit the annual reports. Thus, opportunity for helping the entrepreneurs is lost for the major part of the year.
To deal with it now, accountants use multiple channels to communicate with their clients - WhatsApp, Email, Dropbox - but all these only increase the noise, making it harder to find the right information. The busy entrepreneur may not respond on these channels.
What if there was a simple, focused way for them to communicate? What if there was a single, dedicated channel for their communication? Something which would cut through the distraction and help both sides?
At Visionplanner we built this solution as an app for the entrepreneurs. Accountants would be able to generate tasks they needed the entrepreneurs to perform, thus claiming attention through a dedicated channel. And entrepreneurs would have a clear view on what they needed to do - what documents they needed to approve, and what information they needed to provide.
Thus, ultimately empowering the accountants to better help their clients with the best advice. And also making them more efficient in the annual report creation process.
I was the only designer in the project. I had joined the company when the app development was already underway. Some of the design work was done by the current PMs. I took on the responsibility for improving the design for the existing features as well as designing new features from the ground up.
The App has three main features: