live project
Automated bank reconciliation
Guesty is a property management platform that helps hospitality businesses manage more than 500,000 properties worldwide.
As part of Guesty’s Accounting and Financials team, I designed experiences for managing, reconciling, and distributing booking funds. Guesty needed bank reconciliation to support larger enterprise customers. I designed a scalable experience that reduced manual work while keeping users informed and in control.
Automated bank reconciliation
What is bank reconciliation?
Bank reconciliation compares bank transactions with accounting records to make sure the balances match and every transaction is accounted for.
Even a single incorrect match can affect financial records, making accuracy critical.
Even a single incorrect match can affect financial records, making accuracy critical.
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Design challenge
Users needed to reconcile large volumes of transactions accurately without adding more manual work.
As we moved toward automation, the key challenge became trust. Users needed to understand the results and stay in control before relying on automated matching.
As we moved toward automation, the key challenge became trust. Users needed to understand the results and stay in control before relying on automated matching.
Research
I combined existing customer insights with new research to understand how accountants reconcile transactions today. Through customer conversations and collaboration with accounting specialists, I learned that users were open to automation, but hesitant to rely on matches they could not understand or verify
First prototype and get user feedback
I combined portal data, PMC requests, competitor research, and user feedback to identify the information owners used most often. This helped me prioritize revenue, occupancy, reservations, reviews, and support as the dashboard’s core content.
Introduce automation gradually
Rather than introducing full automation immediately, I proposed a phased rollout, that gradually built user trust. I designed a consistent layout that supported each phase of automation, reducing the learning curve.
Manual process
Users matched transactions manually in a structured workflow, establishing the foundation for automation.
Automated match
The system suggests matches while users reviewed and approved the results, helping them adopt automation with confidence.
Bank integrations
Bank transactions sync automatically, eliminating manual uploads and simplifying reconciliation.
Designing the foundation
I designed the layout to support all three phases without changing the core workflow.
The data source evolves from PDF statement → scanned transactions → direct bank data, while the overall structure remains familiar.
The data source evolves from PDF statement → scanned transactions → direct bank data, while the overall structure remains familiar.
Foundation layout
Design principles
Make automation easy to understand
Transactions were grouped into Matched, Possible Match, and Not Matched, making it easy to understand the system's confidence.
Keep users in control
Automation suggested matches while users made the final decision, focusing their attention only on transactions that required review.
Result and thoughts
Through product improvements and process optimization, I helped reduce manual workload by 30% and contributed to a $100K increase in revenue following contract signing.
This project reinforced that introducing automation is as much a design challenge as a technical one. Building user trust, preserving control, and creating a foundation for future capabilities were just as important as the automation itself.
Interested in the full case study?
The complete case study shows how the project evolved from early research to the final product and launch
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