From Documents to Decisions: Designing AI-Powered Financial Workflows

TL;DR

Finofo pivoted from an FX platform for business owners into an AI-powered AP automation and expense management product. As Senior Product Designer, I owned the end-to-end design of this transition solo shaping product direction, workflows, and experience for the new financial automation system, and shipping the MVP in under 3 months.

Research

The biggest gap in existing AP tools wasn’t automation, it was trust. Competitive analysis across Ramp, Brex, Tipalti, Airbase, and Bill.com showed most players compete on automation depth alone, leaving a clear opening: an AI-first workflow that gives users visibility and control over automated decisions, not just speed. This insight that users don’t trust black-box AI became the foundation for every workflow decision that followed, from confidence scoring to editable AI outputs.

Ideation & Exploration

With trust as the north star, I used agentic prototyping to rapidly explore multiple workflow directions letting me move from concept to testable, high-fidelity flows far faster than traditional wireframing would allow. The key decision that emerged: rather than a fully automated black box, every AI action, extraction, matching, exception flagging needed to be visible and editable by the user before it became final. This shaped the core structure of the document review experience.

Left: reasoning through the purchase order status model — filter definitions, data structure, and the status icon registry — before a single pixel was placed. Right: the resulting interface, generated and iterated on in the same conversation.

Final design

Once the flows were defined, I moved from agentic prototypes into high-fidelity designs aligned with Finofo’s brand direction, an AI-native workflow from research through to final UI. The interface makes AI’s role visible rather than hidden: confidence scores, editable extracted values, and clear approval states all reinforce the transparency users said they were missing from existing tools. The goal throughout: make complex financial interactions feel clear, structured, and trustworthy.

Dashboard

Document Index (table)

Document view

Vendors view

Impact

The MVP launched with Finofo's pilot clients, replacing manual invoice handling. Users confirmed it made approvals significantly easier with one exception: the inbox required a click-through to a separate view for context, then back again, slowing high-volume reviews.

🎯 Focus mode

A continuous review view document coding, bill-line detail, and the original invoice side-by-side, with Approve & Next to move straight to the following document. What was a multi-step round trip became one uninterrupted flow.