Crypto Accounting Platform

tactic | 2021 - 2022

Leading design 0→1 to bring a B2B digital asset accounting platform to the market and help finance teams close their books.

Role

Design consultant driving product design end-to-end (UI, prototyping, usability testing, visual design, and design library) for the entire platform

Highlights

  • Saved customer Finance teams hours of tax preparation

  • Acquired by TaxBit in 2022

Business Problem

Crypto started to appear on more balance sheets, but there weren't too many solutions in the market to really help companies wrangle taxes for thousands of monthly transactions.

Companies dealing with crypto were at risk of IRS audits and huge fines if they weren't confident with their accounting. I joined the team as the first designer and, with my partner-in-crime—the lead product manager, brought automated solutions that helped businesses do their taxes in a clean, compliant way.

Discovery

This was still a novel space brimming with opportunities. I surrounded myself with experts to pick their brains.

  • Crypto was confusing, but so were taxes. Luckily, we had our own accountant at the company that I could reach out to as a proxy to our users.
  • We had a few customer friendlies that offered their time to walk us through how they close their books.
  • There were a few other players in this space, so we studied their products and tracked their movements.

Key Insights

There's no one place where users can access data across all of their wallets and exchanges.

A Head of Finance had his engineers pull transactions from different sources to calculate their cost-basis and fees, which takes about 40 hours per month.

Certain actions can only be done by reaching out to the Tactic team to have them handle it on their side.

Things like mapping a chart of accounts is only possible by contacting Tactic and having the Engineering team set this up manually.

Keeping transactions organized was not easy.

Customers spent too much time categorizing and labeling their transactions.

Design

I proposed a UI to help visualize all of a company's transactions and activity.

The Transactions page brings together financial activity from the user's various wallets and exchanges and automatically reconciles data, separates fees, handles price conversion, and calculates gains and losses.

Low fidelity mockup of the transactions page.

Users would be able to categorize transactions quickly in this new experience.

This is a high frequency touchpoint for users, as they're making sure their transactions are properly labeled for when they look at their final numbers.

We came up with a way to provide even more value: automating transactions with rules.

Users can set up logic in the rules engine to automatically categorize transactions as they come in. These rules could be applied retroactively as well, giving users granular control.

Complete setup within the app is now possible, unblocking users and giving our internal team some breathing room.

From getting their exchanges and wallets set up to mapping the chart of accounts, users are now empowered to get their job done without having to jump on a call with someone from Tactic.

Impact

"It has helped tremendously to go from looking at 10,000 transactions to just one dashboard. Our finance resources are now able to spend time on mission-critical items like the payment infrastructure of our business."

"We may dedicate 8 to 10 hours a month to crypto accounting nowadays."

"There is very little, if any, clean up required and the UI and dashboard are something our accountants love too."

Tactic raised 11 million in funding in September 2022 and was acquired shortly after by TaxBit.

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