Controle Plus
Transforming corporate expense management with artificial intelligence and a frictionless mobile-first experience.
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
Background
Managing corporate expenses has historically been a painful tug-of-war. On one side, employees hoarding crumpled paper receipts in their wallets, manually typing values into endless Excel spreadsheets. On the other side, finance teams spending weeks verifying these papers, hunting down policy violations, and delaying overall reimbursements.
Controle Plus was born to disrupt this chaotic ecosystem. Working closely with the founders and the engineering squad, I led the end-to-end product design strategy for a platform that uses AI and OCR to completely automate the journey from receipt capture to enterprise accounting clearance. Taking this from an abstract pitch deck idea to a fully functioning B2B SaaS platform was deeply rewarding.
Understanding the problem
The Receipt Graveyard. Employees feel demotivated when required to safe-keep dozens of physical receipts during business travels. A lost receipt often means money out of their own pocket, creating severe animosity towards the company.
The Accounting Bottleneck. There is a massive temporal gap between a purchase being made and the finance team actually seeing it. This blindness prevents CFOs from tracking real-time cash flow, as they have to wait for the infamous 'month-end closing' crunch.
The Trust Deficit. Fraud, whether intentional (tampered receipts) or accidental (duplicate entries, non-compliant categories), constantly slips through the cracks of manual human verification, costing enterprises thousands of dollars annually.
Pain Point Analysis Map
The product vision
Frictionless Data Capture. We want to empower employees by allowing them to literally 'snap and forget'. By using an advanced OCR engine, the app automatically extracts merchants, dates, and amounts without ever asking the user to type numeric data.
Intelligent Validation. We aim to shift the burden of verification from human accountants to machine learning models that cross-reference every expense against dynamic company policies in milliseconds.
Empowered Accounting. We want to completely retire the Excel spreadsheet, providing CFOs with a real-time, pristine dashboard that syncs seamlessly with their existing big-tech ERP architectures.
Defining the MVP
Smart OCR Scanner. The absolute core requirement. A swift camera interface that could parse Brazilian and International fiscal receipts despite poor lighting or crumpled edges.
Multi-level Approvals. Instead of emails, pinging managers via push notifications for instant one-tap approvals on flagged expenses.
ERP Sync Pipeline. An export module ensuring that final batches fit perfectly into SAP and ContaAzul accounting formats.
Working with developers
Stage 0 - Infrastructure Architecture. Mapping out the robust AWS container pipeline that would securely handle sensitive financial data and receipt image buckets.
Stage 1 - The OCR Engine. Prototyping and tuning the UI feedback layers during the 2-3 seconds the AI took to confidently digitize the physical receipt, ensuring users felt the process was magical, not stalled.
Stage 2 - Dashboard & Web App. Constructing the heavy web-portal required by the finance team to bulk-approve and audit thousands of expense rows efficiently.
Final Designs & Interfaces
Results and takeaways
AI is an assistant, not a gatekeeper.At the beginning, we made the OCR block the flow if it couldn't read the image. We quickly learned that physically faded ink meant the AI failed frequently. Opening an immediate manual-override mode saved the user experience.
Focus on the real problem over visual flair.I spent initial weeks perfecting a colorful dashboard, but the real breaking point was whether the core 'scan receipt' action felt instant. Re-prioritizing the mobile camera UX over web dashboard aesthetics changed the game.
B2B means satisfying two vastly different users.The buyer (CFO) wants strictness, complex rules, and detailed analytics. The end-user (Sales Rep) wants absolute simplicity and zero friction. Finding the bridge between absolute compliance and effortless usability was the ultimate design challenge.