Dare to be different!
‘Let’s create something Tax professionals like to use.‘ With that simple, elegant idea, we started designing TPdoc, our star product for automating transfer pricing documentation. In this article, I’ll show you how we designed TPdoc and what kind of patterns and principles we used for creating the user experience (hereafter referred to as “UX”) …
To design TPdoc, our team works in close collaboration with both external and our own in-house experienced TP professionals. We observe their workflows, conduct interviews to learn about their needs and challenges.
Doing UX research helped us a lot in understanding their challenges, needs and goals. TP professionals process huge amounts of information, analyze lots of data, keep track of important changes and file a lot of missing data requests. And details, context and specifics are crucial for them in creating coherent master and local files.
We also learned that TP professionals experience time pressure to meet the deadlines for submitting their files. In other words, speed is super important for them.
To validate our assumptions, we do weekly design reviews with our own TP professionals to present our ideas, gather feedback and keep iterating on them until we see smiling faces.
After the design phase, the transfer pricing team tests all features released by our development team to find out if these survive real client scenarios.
All those activities proved invaluable for our design and development team to grow empathy for our users.
”"There should be a system that helps me easily generate master and local files based on the data I enter. Imagine what you can do with such a system!"
Sonia Catalina MuñozTransfer Pricing Consultant
Thank you Word and Excel, but it‘s time to move on
TP specialists are smart. They realize that the current way of working, with manually compiling a master and local file for every fiscal year, is inefficient and outdated. The Word and Excel only workflow keeps them from using a smart data-driven, standardized approach that they need. The manual efforts on low intelligence elements of the process must be reduced.
Every year the amount of information the TP professionals have to analyze increases. Clients expect faster and better results and every year authorities come up with new compliance regulations. It is, therefore, becoming increasingly difficult to meet all requirements and expectations for TP specialists.
