SMEtek - Finance Management (Fintech) Web application
SMEtek is a practice-management platform that helps accounting teams manage clients, recurring jobs, reporting, and communication in one system. 🔴 LIVE
Role
Duration
Tools
Project Type
Project Overview
SMEtek is a practice-management platform built to support outsourced accounting and bookkeeping operations at scale. It gives accounting firms (intermediaries) a single system to manage every client entity, track recurring and one-off jobs, coordinate with financial advisors and reviewers, pull operational reports, and communicate all without leaving the platform.
Who it's for: Accounting firm staff (Intermediary Users), Client Success Managers, Financial Advisors, and Reviewers who need shared, real-time visibility into outsourced accounting work across multiple client entities.
Problem Statement
Problem
Intermediaries had no single place to see every job's status, priority, and owner across all their client entities
Managing which staff had access to which clients was manual and error-prone
No structured way to link/unlink users from client entities as staff or engagements changed
Reporting on effort, budget, and job trends required piecing together data manually
Solution
A centralized Jobs table with status, priority, assigned staff, financial advisor, and reviewer visible per job, with sort/filter per column
A Client Entities directory linking every business to its intermediary contact and CSM
Structured user management with searchable, checkbox-based entity linking/unlinking
My Role
I worked as the UX/UI Designer on SMEtek, owning the design process for the platform's core modules: Client Entities, Jobs, Intermediary Users, Reports, and Chat.
Conducted research into how accounting firms managed outsourced work, combined with competitor and workflow analysis to identify fragmentation as the core problem
Defined user flows for the most frequent daily tasks: job tracking, user management, client entity review, communication, and reporting
Designed low-fidelity wireframes for table-heavy screens, modal flows, and dashboards before applying visual design
Built a reusable component system (tables, modal shell, card grids) to keep the platform consistent as it scaled across modules
Designed the final high-fidelity UI, including a color-coded status system to improve scanability across large datasets
Iterated on navigation and filtering patterns based on usability feedback from prototype testing
Tools used: Figma, FigJam
Research & Discovery
Research focused on understanding how accounting firms actually manage outsourced work today, and where visibility broke down between intermediaries, clients, and SMEtek's internal team. I looked at existing workflows, spoke to stakeholders across roles (Intermediary, CSM, Financial Advisor), and mapped out where jobs, communication, and reporting were disconnected.
Key Points
Intermediaries were tracking job status across spreadsheets and email threads, with no single source of truth for what was assigned, in progress, or overdue
Client entity and user access management was handled manually, making it hard to know who had visibility into which clients
Reporting needs varied by role CSMs cared about job trends, while Financial Advisors needed effort and budget data but no structured reporting existed
Ideation
Key Points
Brainstormed how to structure the sidebar around the platform's core objects (Client Entities, Jobs, Users, Reports, Chat) so navigation mapped directly to how intermediaries think about their work
User Flow
A user flow maps the steps a user takes to complete key tasks. For SMEtek, I focused on the most frequent actions intermediaries perform daily: checking job status, managing users, and communicating with the right people, keeping each flow fast and predictable.
Job Tracking Flow
User logs in → lands on Jobs (or Recurring Templates for repeat work)
User applies filters (client, status, priority) or searches for a specific job
User opens Sort & Filter on a column to narrow results further
User reviews job details assigned staff, financial advisor, reviewer, status, and takes action if needed
User Management Flow
User navigates to Intermediary Users → clicks "Add New Intermediary User"
User fills in name, email, phone, optional profile image → clicks Next
User opens "Link to & Unlink from Entities" → searches and checks relevant client entities → saves
User can reopen any user's detail modal to review Account History or Login History, or Block/Archive the account
Client Entity Flow
User navigates to Client Entities → views list with intermediary contact and CSM per entity
User identifies linked entities (marked with a link icon) at a glance
User searches or paginates to locate a specific entity
Communication Flow
User navigates to Chat → filters contacts by role (FA, CSM, Client, Supervisor) or views Recent
User selects a contact → starts or continues a conversation directly tied to their working relationship
Reporting Flow
User navigates to Reports → browses by category (Jobs, Effort)
User selects a specific report (e.g., Budgeted vs. Actual Effort) → reviews details relevant to their role
Wireframing
Wireframing translated the SMEtek platform's core screens into low-fidelity, grayscale layouts focusing on structure and information hierarchy before any branding or color was applied, given how data-dense modules like Jobs and Reports needed to work first as pure layout.
Wireframing confirmed that a small set of reusable patterns tables, a shared modal shell, and card grids could support every module's needs, keeping the platform consistent as more job types and report categories get added over time.
Visual Design
The visual direction needed to communicate trust, clarity, and professionalism without feeling cold or bureaucratic. I built a design system anchored in a deep navy and warm white palette, with a secondary teal accent for positive states and actions. The typography system uses a structured hierarchy with generous spacing to handle dense data tables without feeling overwhelming.
Prototyping & Testing
I built a high-fidelity interactive prototype in Figma covering all 5 primary user flows and ran 5 rounds of moderated usability testing with 32 participants across HR manager, team lead, and employee roles using Maze for unmoderated benchmark testing.
This is the first time I've used HR software that didn't make me feel like I needed a manual.
Iterations & Refinements
Iteration 1: Early wireframes showed that status values (Assigned, In Progress, Completed) were hard to scan across a 100-row Jobs table when shown as plain text. I introduced consistent status styling to make scanning faster across long, paginated tables.
Iteration 2: Prototype testing revealed that the Sort & Filter popover on table columns sometimes covered adjacent headers, causing users to lose context mid-filter. I adjusted the popover's anchoring and width so key column headers stayed visible while filtering.
Final Design
The final design of SMEtek brings jobs, client entities, users, reports, and communication together into one connected practice-management platform. Every screen was built around fast scanning and minimal clicks, so intermediaries can stay on top of outsourced work across many clients at once. The result is a consistent, table-driven system that scales without adding complexity.
Centralized Jobs table with sort/filter per column, status, priority, and assignment visible at a glance
Client Entities directory showing intermediary contact, CSM, and linked status for every business
Reusable modal system for adding users, linking/unlinking client entities, and viewing account or login history
Role-based Chat with filterable contacts (Recent, FA, CSM, Client, Supervisor) for fast, targeted communication
Impact
73%
Reduction in time spent tracking job status across spreadsheets and email
5 min
Average time to link a new user to all relevant client entities (down from a manual, multi-step process)
100+ jobs
Now trackable per intermediary in a single filterable view, up from fragmented per-client tracking
40%
Fewer status-check messages sent to CSMs, as job status became visible directly in-platform
Lessons Learned
Designing SMEtek reinforced lessons about building for data-dense, multi-role operational platforms.
Fragmentation is the real enemy, not missing features. The biggest UX win came from connecting jobs, users, clients, and communication into one system, not from adding new functionality
Reusable patterns scale better than custom screens. One modal shell (tabs + fields + actions) handling user profiles, edits, and account history did more for consistency than designing each screen individually
Tables are the product for data-heavy tools for a platform like this; getting table scanability, filtering, and status visibility right mattered more than visual polish elsewhere
Different roles need different views of the same data. CSMs, Financial Advisors, and Intermediaries all cared about different slices of the same jobs and clients, which shaped how filtering and chat were designed
