Enterprise Finance Transformation Platform
Replaced a fragmented, Excel-based finance reporting system across 1000+ companies with a unified digital platform — cutting reporting cycles from days to hours and eliminating manual consolidation errors.
Companies migrated to the platform
Distinct role-based user experiences
Reporting cycle reduction
Developers supported by design system
Situation
A thousand companies running on spreadsheets and phone calls
A major division within a global industrial conglomerate was managing financial reporting for over 1000 subsidiary and group companies. The entire process — data collection, consolidation, trial balance reporting, and final submission — ran on a patchwork of Excel spreadsheets, email chains, and phone calls.
Every month, hundreds of finance teams across multiple countries manually gathered data, entered it into spreadsheets, validated it against accounting rules, and submitted it up the hierarchy for review. The process was slow, error-prone, and expensive.
The organization needed a ground-up digital transformation of their finance operations — not a cosmetic facelift, but a fundamentally reimagined workflow built around the real pain points of the people doing the work every day.
Challenge
People, process, and scale — all at once
Three roles, three mental models
Financial Reporters entering raw data. Controllers overseeing and consolidating submissions from dozens of companies. Admins configuring the platform itself. Each role operated in a fundamentally different mode: data entry vs. oversight vs. configuration.
An entrenched Excel culture
Finance professionals had spent careers in spreadsheets. Any platform that didn't respect this muscle memory would face immediate resistance. The challenge: feel familiar enough to adopt, but structured enough to eliminate the errors spreadsheets couldn't prevent.
Bilingual, cross-cultural complexity
The platform needed to work in English and Japanese — affecting table layouts, navigation patterns, terminology, and communication workflows. Not just translation, but cross-cultural design.
Enterprise-scale data integrity
With 1000+ companies feeding data into a consolidated view, even small errors compounded. Built-in validation, automated consolidation, and clear audit trails were non-negotiable.
Our Approach
Applying the Itero Loop
A 17-month engagement where service design methodology drove every product decision.
Understand
Primary user research was conducted by a local research agency to ensure cultural and linguistic accuracy with Japanese finance teams. We used this research to build deep empathy with three user personas.
Key insight: the core problem wasn't data entry — it was the absence of trust. Reporters didn't trust the data they submitted. Controllers didn't trust the data they received. Executives didn't trust the reports they reviewed. The platform's primary job wasn't to digitize spreadsheets — it was to rebuild trust in financial data.
Shape
We defined MVP scope through user scenarios, not feature lists — identifying three critical flows: Raw Data Submission (Reporter), Review & Submit Consolidated Trial Balance (Controller), and Master Setup (Admin).
Service blueprints mapped each scenario layer by layer: triggers, user intent, actions, front-stage interactions, and back-stage systems. These blueprints became the single reference for the entire 60-person cross-functional team.
A critical design decision: we kept the table-based data input format rather than a form wizard. Finance professionals think in rows and columns. The innovation wasn't replacing the spreadsheet — it was wrapping it with intelligent validation, submission workflows, and audit trails.
Build
Design system built from scratch using Atomic Design methodology — from atoms (inputs, buttons) to organisms (data entry panels, status dashboards). An interaction pattern library documented how every component behaved, ensuring consistency across 50 developers.
Key deliverables: structured data input with real-time validation and a Check → Save → Submit flow; consolidated oversight dashboards with auto-adjustment transparency; Journal Entry tools with reason documentation; real-time Balance Check indicators; and self-service admin configuration.
The design team also created the product brand identity from scratch — name, logo, usage guidelines, and visual language that carried through the entire product UI.
Refine
Bi-weekly usability testing sessions ran from the start. Testing revealed critical refinements: error displays needed separation into blockers vs. warnings; the Journal Entry interface needed multi-year views; navigation was simplified from deep hierarchy to a flatter model.
The design team owned content and translation end-to-end — maintaining a UI glossary, managing translation requests, and auditing for text overflow between English and Japanese character sets.
Results
From Excel chaos to a unified digital platform
The platform transformed finance operations for 1000+ companies across multiple countries.
Companies onboarded to the platform
Reporting cycle transformation
Reporter, Controller, Admin — each with tailored experiences
Full bilingual platform with managed translation
Component library enabling consistent delivery across 50 devs
Product name, logo, and guidelines created from scratch