As a global company, Bosch’s accounts payable clerks faced the tedious task of managing invoice payments across departments and vendors. To address this, I designed the Bosch AP Automation Tool—a 0-to-1 solution that streamlines invoice matching, payment, and contract management.
User satisfaction score 4.5
UI satisfaction score 4.3
UI/UX design &research
Mar 2023 - July 2023(12 weeks project)
2 Designers
1 PM
1 Engineer
The challenge
The Account Payable (AP) department processes 100+ invoices monthly, manually matching these invoices with existing contracts to ensure timely payments to vendors.
Ideally, It takes 2 days to complete the tasks.However, delays were common—sometimes stretching beyond four weeks in the manual process.
OUR SOLUTION
Reducing payment delays through streamlined invoice and contract matching.
Over 12 weeks, we executed an end-to-end design process, addressing pain points across three main user groups to deliver a unified platform.
Discover
Understand our users
We held stakeholder workshops and 8 Interviews to discover the current workflow challenges, including our direct user AP clerks and indirect users.
Why has the payment been delayed for over a month?
From expert interviews, it became clear: delays weren’t due to a single point of failure—they were the result of fragmented tools, manual workflows, and delayed communication.
Prioritize problems
Currently, AP clerks manually process invoices using Excel spreadsheets with over 20 columns. The matching process is slow, repetitive, and prone to human error.
Current invoice list in Excel
Currently, contracts are stored across different platforms—local drives, emails, cloud storage, and shared drives. If AP clerks still cannot find them, they must take the next step: contacting the tax department or third parties and waiting longer for a response.
Stakeholders were frustrated with current experiences and eager for change.
Hypotheses
⚙️
Automate the invoice–contract matching process to reduce manual effort and error.
📁
Centralize contract storage to streamline search and comparison.
Exploration
I proposed developing an automated platform that compares key fields in contracts and invoices, with a collapsible list to display key information.
Before: displaying 100+ invoices in a massive Excel sheet with 20+ columns
After: a foldable invoice list using a hierarchical structure to reduce cognitive load.
This allowed users to view only essential data at first glance, expand sections for detailed comparison, and quickly identify discrepancies between invoice and contract data.
iteration
Rapid Prototyping and Feedback Collection
We developed three prototype versions and gathered iterative feedback from AP clerks and engineers.
During user interviews, we asked AP clerks to walk us through their contract retrieval process. We discovered that they often opened multiple platforms and windows—such as email, shared drives, and local folders—to locate contracts.
Ideation
Rapid Prototyping and Feedback Collection
To address this inefficiency, I proposed collaborating with the Tax department to build a centralized contract platform. This allowed AP clerks to access all contracts from a single interface and compare invoice and contract side-by-side for faster verification
We aligned with 2 goals with TAX department:
This allowed AP clerks to access all contracts from a single interface and compare invoice and contract side-by-side for faster verification
iteration
Rapid Prototyping and Feedback Collection
We developed three prototype versions and gathered iterative feedback from AP clerks and engineers.
✕
