Aviera
2024
Expanding Aviera for finance teams
Designing approval workflows, budget controls, and review processes to support growing organizations.
Overview
The challenge
Aviera was originally designed for individual and small-team expense tracking. As organizations grew, finance teams needed more control over how spending requests, reimbursements, and vendor payments were reviewed and approved.
Without approval workflows, financial operations relied on manual communication, spreadsheets, and disconnected processes that slowed decision-making and reduced visibility across departments. The goal was to expand Aviera into a more capable B2B platform while maintaining the simplicity that existing users appreciated.
Problem
Supporting growing organizations
Aviera was originally built around expense tracking and spending visibility. As organizations grew, finance teams needed more control over how requests, reimbursements, vendor payments, and department budgets were reviewed and approved. Many approval processes were still handled through email, chat messages, and spreadsheets, creating unnecessary delays and reducing visibility across teams.
Users often struggled to understand who was responsible for a request, where approvals were blocked, and what action was required next. The challenge was to introduce enterprise workflows without sacrificing the simplicity that made the product easy to use.
Design
Designing approval workflows
Rather than treating approvals as isolated actions, I focused on creating a connected workflow system that brought requests, budgets, policies, and reporting into a single experience. The goal was to help finance teams understand what required attention, track progress across departments, and make decisions with greater confidence.
The final solution introduced dedicated approval workflows, budget governance tools, approval rules, activity history, and operational insights designed specifically for growing organizations.
Centralized approval dashboard for reviewing requests, tracking statuses, and reducing delays.
Designed a streamlined approval dashboard for faster reviews and decision-making.
Improved approval management through clearer workflows and request visibility.
Reflection
Designing for operational complexity
This project highlighted the difference between designing for individuals and designing for organizations. While expense tracking focuses on visibility, financial operations depend on coordination between people, teams, and processes.
The most impactful improvements came from making responsibilities, approval states, and next steps visible throughout the workflow. By reducing ambiguity and creating clearer pathways through the system, the experience became easier to navigate while supporting significantly more complex organizational needs.
This feels much closer to the style and depth of your Polaris case study while still being noticeably shorter.
