Cegid Flow

We researched, designed and built a product to help French small business owners manage their cash flow, plan ahead and keep on top of their accounting.

In the process we helped Cegid, France’s leading accounting software provider, unlock a new and highly sought-after market: small business owners.

A little je ne sais quoi

To conduct our interviews, We met entrepeneurs in their place of business. Pictured: Improvibar in Le Marais

We ran workshops and interviews with stakeholders, accountants and small business owners in France to set out the vision for Cegid Flow.

As we designed and built the product, we placed the Entrepreneurs’ needs at the center of our approach: ideating, prototyping, testing and validating each feature. With this ongoing super valuable insight, we could give the small business owners exactly what they lacked: Clarity. With a single app that brings everything together they can monitor the financial health of their business in real time. Now they no longer need to wait until the end of the fiscal year.

Testing with small business owners and ideating with Cegid stakeholders.

This also helps facilitate the relationship & collaboration between entrepreneurs and their accountants. Cegid Flow and its built-in AI do most of the leg-work of collecting, analyzing and matching receipts and bank transactions and prepping the accounts. The Experts-Comptables can now focus on where they bring the most value: advising their clients in the growth of their business.

From ideation to Design System

Evolution of the Cegid Flow home screen

We explored several visual directions to nail the striking style of the Cegid Flow app, which takes the existing Cegid brand and playfully pushes it further. The tone of voice of the product is honest, personable and supportive.

The app is organised around a dashboard which provides at a glance all the information the Entrepreneur needs: How much is in the bank, how much is owed to them (with the possibility to chase there and then) and what they still have to pay; as well as a visual comparison of money in and out so far this month.

From there, the entrepreneur can navigate to several pages which give them different views of the company’s financial situation. In Predicted Cash, the recurring payments and upcoming invoices give a month's end preview. In Analysis, the owner can explore their spending per category. They can snap receipts throughout, with weekly encouragements to hellp the busy Entrepreneur keep on top of their admin.

The accounting and bank entries are the foundation building blocks of the Cegid Flow app, and manifest as line, snippet and pages across the interface.

On resilience

The drastic change in circumstances of 2020 further validated the urgent need for Cegid Flow and shifted our ways of working overnight, but the generosity of entrepreneurs with their time and insight remained a constant.

The Cegid Flow app was soft-launched in April 2021 - and I hope it will help and empower many small business owners in the months and years to come.

+ Cegid Flow's product page
+ Cegid Flow on the App Store

Method - 2020 - 2021

Team: Sandrine Herbert-Razafiniato, Adeline Moreau, Chris Macdonald,
Adriana Coppola, James Steiner, Mikhaylo Ilyin, Luke Thompson & Stuti Kaushik.