In the early days at Divvy, there were only two roles in the app: 1) Admin – a role with access to literally everything and 2) a Member – a role with access to virtually nothing. It soon became clear that we needed a third role closer to the middle of both extremes and thus the bookkeeper role was born.
From 2018-2021, the bookkeeper role was among the top 5 most requested features from customers.
The mission was not as simple as just building a new role; Divvy needed a role and permission framework due to years of tech debt and “bandaid” solutions.
In order to architect our solution properly and define roles in a way that made sense, we needed customer input.
Methodologies:
The primary job to be done was to reconcile financial records. This included activities such as categorizing transactions to match accounting systems, making sure transactions included required fields, syncing transactions to their accounting software, and running reports.
The two most common job titles users indicated for this role were Accountant and Bookkeeper.
Separation of duties was critical to our users (especially enterprise customers).
While there was consensus on most permissions, there were 3 permissions that were split 50/50.
We identified 2 additional roles needed by our customers in our research process.
