Full Time Role | Product Design
Focus
Product Design
Role
Product Designer
Date
Jan - Oct 2022
Before multi-entity billing, customers would receive one credit bill that was paid from one bank account, regardless of how many legal entities they had. This diagram shows card spend from Acme HQ, Acme LLC, and Acme Corp are all consolidated into a single credit bill.
With multi-entity support, customers can choose entities to be billed separately from a parent entity - allowing them to have multiple entities with multiple bills, being paid from multiple bank accounts.
With my initial explorations, I simply adapted our existing L1 Accounts page to include multiple entities under the credit section.
Exploration sketches
L1 Accounts Page v1
Additional rows to the Brex credit section
This solution was very clean and simple, but concerns around scalability arose. After feedback during a director review, we agreed that the additional complexity and depth that came with a multi-entity world warranted an L1 > L2 > L3 page structure as opposed to clicking directly into an entity from the L1 page.
After some iteration, I landed on the following designs.
L1 Page
L2 Page
L3 Page
One of Brex's major initiatives in 2022 is to become an increasingly global company as customers became more and more global themselves. Customers that are global inevitably face problems when using a product that was built with just the US in mind.
Employees of global customers need to spend in their local currency, but Brex only supports billing in USD. This which forces them to deal with FX rates when making payments and intercompany transactions where local entities need to repay the parent for their share of the bill.
In this pre-global support world, entities could be operating in their local currency but get bills in USD that need to be paid in USD.
The goal was to unlock an experience where entities could have employees spending in their local currency, getting billed in their local currency, and paying out of a bank account in their local currency.
The main difference between US and non-US billing has to do with payments. For entities billed in USD, customers set up autopay and they pay on the 15th of each month — pretty simple. For non-USD, an autopay feature where Brex automatically pulls money from an account is not possible. Instead, customers have to push payments manually from their local bank accounts in order to pay off their balance.
So instead of choosing an autopay account to pay bills from, Brex would set up a local bank account in the entity's country and provide that account's details to the user. The user would then go log in to their own bank account and send a wire to the account set up by Brex. After 3-5 days, Brex would receive the money and the entity's balance would be cleared.
For multi-entity, there needed to be a flow where users could select an entity to be billed separately by selecting the entity and the autopay account. For non-USD billing, there are no autopay accounts so the flow needed to be modified.
These designs show how a user would select an international entity to be billed separately in its local currency.
Edit Billing Flow - Select entity
Select billing currency
Manual payment disclaimer
Review screen
Non-USD entities have their bills cut on the same day as USD entities, but because they need to be paid manually, there is a 12 day grace period after the bill is cut where customers can make their payment. On the L2 designs below, you can see non-USD entities with a "Payment due" status and a button to view their manual payment info.
L2 page before bills are cut
L2 page after bills are cut
View payment info button --> Side panel
When the user clicks the "View payment info" button, a side panel opens where they can view their payment info (due date + amount) as well as the account details of the bank they need to manually wire. There is also a checkbox to mark the payment as initiated to disable email reminders and let other admins know that the payment process has already been started for this entity.
The L3 page for a non-USD entity also is adapted to show amounts in local currency along with the same "View payment info" button that opens the side panel.
L3 page with amounts in local currency
Lastly, I considered how to make the L1 page reflect the global changes that were made in the L2 and L3 pages. I wanted to showcase Brex's global nature without overloading the page or being redundant with content that was on the L2/L3 pages. I settled on a hover state where users can see a breakdown of the different currencies that make up their credit balance.
L1 Page
Currency breakdown on hover
After 10 months at Brex, I was unfortunately included in the 11% of the company that was laid off in October 2022. I grew so much as a designer in 2022 working with all of the talented people at Brex and am really grateful for the opportunity I had!