GR1 - ReimburseMe

Pam Chuang, Ari Dukes, Leo Espindle

Problem Statement

Our product will help to address issues for travelers, their managers, and auditors.  For the primary user (the travelers themselves), we will make both business trip planning and reimbursement easier so that they can spend time working on the main parts of their jobs.  Currently, if you consider a salesperson traveling regularly from Boston to NYC:

• 225 miles (Distance between Boston and NYC) * $.50/mile (IRS reimbursement per mile) * 2 trips (Round trip) = $275/week/employee
• Assume that salespeople travel twice a month: $550/month/employee
• Assume that 5% of the company uses this system in a 500 person company
• Of these 25 employees, 10 employees actually use this system, because they own a car.
• Value saved by the company: 10 employees * $550/month * 12 months/year = $66,000 / year

Our program provides the value proposition of planning, reimbursement, and auditing. 

User analysis

There are a few main personas to represent the main users of our product:

• Phyllis the Traveler
• Juan the Auditor
• Mary the Approver

Phyllis the Traveler

Phyllis is a salesperson and an experienced traveler.  She works late almost everyday and is always looking for new ways to make her daily job more efficient, especially for tasks that do not directly impact her performance at her job.  She has three kids, and therefore wants to maximize the amount of time she spends at home.  She is comfortable with using the internet from her daily job, but she is not necessarily up to date with the newest cutting edge technology.  She finds that during reimbursements is the worst part of her day, and most of the time has to take care of her expense reporting at home, because she is not allowed to bill those hours to her work.  Phyllis wants an interface that is easy to use and will save her a lot of time.

Juan the Auditor

Juan is an auditor who has to deal with multiple systems.  Juan works in the finance department and has to transfer the data from expense reporting to the financial software used by the finance department for bigger expenses.  Juan enjoys his job because of the analytical aspects of his job that he enjoys doing and therefore also enjoys finding mistakes that people make.  Juan's primary role is to look at expense reports and compare line items to insure that there is nothing wrong between the receipts and expense reporting.  Juan analyzes total travel expenses for all employees across the whole company and is always looking for incremental ways to improve travel expense reporting.

Mary the Approver (Travel Manager)

Mary is a manager who cares about dealing with her budget.  She has ten employees and just wants to see the big picture and see how her employees are spending money.  She generally only cares about big ticket items but will appreciate the improvement in her budget as long as she does not have to put in any extra effort.  She’s a busy manager who does not check the individual line items and is constantly approving different line items.  She is very busy at work and with kids, and she does not have time to analyze the line items but has to approve the expense reports.  She consults with the traveler to help them plan where to go.  She is part of the initial process and a user of the system herself.  Phyllis is her direct report.  She likes her job, and she’s older.  Mary is less tech savvy than Phyllis.  Mary drives a Cadillac.

Task analysis

There are a few main tasks involved with creating ReimburseMe.  These tasks include:

• Creating a trip
• Approving the trip
• Analyzing the trip

Creating a trip

Goal: Enter a trip into the system for eventual approval

• Decide where you want to go on your trip
• Enter/modify trip information
• Submit or Save the trip

Preconditions

• Have a profile
• Need to know where you want to go
• Need an approver
• Need a personal car or authority to go on a trip

Time constraints

• Company policy for limit of time
• Have to be before you get reimbursement

Frequency of use

• Everyday - incremental data entry to input data

Approve a trip

Goal: sign off on an amount for reimbursement for mileage

• View queue
• View details of specific trip
• Approve/reject a trip

Preconditions

• Have employees assigned to you
• Employees have to create a trip
• Have to have a profile
• Trip should be submitted by traveler

Time constraints

• Company policy for limit of time
• Have to be before employee gets reimbursement

Frequency of use

• Once a week

Analyze trip

Goal: Look for discrepancies or unusual behaviors in mileage

• Choose how you want to visualize information
• Check trends or rankings
• Go from trend/ranking to more detail (trips)
• Flag a trip that looks questionable

Preconditions

• Trips submitted and approved
• Profile
• Authority to view multiple trips
• Authority to see analytics

Time constraints

• None

Frequency of use

• Every day

Domain analysis

Lessons Learned from Interviews

Lessons learned from the business consultant (Traveler persona):

Things already done well for expense reporting:

• Company has their own homegrown system for business expenses
• Air, hotel, car rental was automatically input from company AMEX

Things that are not done well with regard to expense reporting:

• "Meals were the worst", "we end up 'estimating' " (anything under a certain amount - depending on city - does not require receipts)
• Gas/mileage is done by the mile.
  

Lessons learned from VP of Sales (Approver Persona):

Things that are not done well with regard to expense reporting:

• Manager hands sign approvals.  Need a quick way to make sure that no line items are completely inaccurate
• People end up submitting all reports at the same time, and the system gets crowded all at once, therefore need a solution that can handle high volume and allow the person receiving the high volume to be able to deal with all the expenses

Lessons learned from auditor (Auditor Persona):

Things that are not done well with regard to expense reporting:

• Very manual process of comparing line items to ensure correctness
• Sending back when people make mistakes is very time consuming
• End up having to work with multiple systems at once