Workflow Analysis

Case Study: DOCUMENTING ACCOUNTS PAYABLE WORKFLOW AND PAIN POINTS IN JOBS-TO-BE-DONE STUDY 

• The Problem: BILL offers a sophisticated Accounts Payable product designed to support financial management for small and medium businesses. At the highest level, we understood the Job-to-be-done: Pay my bills on time. We did not, however, understand how our customers broke down this problem, how they supported the process with software, or what pain points remained. 

• Why does it matter? Without a consistent, structured, data-informed process documentation, product groups struggled to align on a common language and prioritization. There was also a lack of context on where BILL fits into the larger workflow, a lack of empathy for the customer pain points, and a strategy for future development.

• Approach: 

  • Internal interviews and workshopping to align on a hypothesized workflow for the accounts payable process

  • Interviews with current customers on their processes and pain

  • Interviews with non-customers to understand how pain and process may differ when using other tools

• Insights: 

  • Identified 3 steps in the AP workflow that had significant pain

  • Offered recommendations for addressing these pain points

  • Developed a data-informed journey map that documented the AP workflow steps

• Impact:

  • 3 Areas of identified pain have been addressed with AI solutions that are either in production or already released as part of the product. For example, BILL's W-9 agent now exists to alleviate pain during the vendor onboarding process. I am working with the team to expand the capability to address additional steps of the vendor onboarding process.

  • Journey map diagram used in presentations by VP+ colleagues as of 2026 to align on workflow steps and sources of pain.