Product Design Process:

Admins Tracking Their Own Hours

User research and understanding the customer problem

Customer support helped to identify a pain point with small business administrators that wanted to track time for themselves in QuickBooks Online, but couldn’t because of a technical restriction that only allowed users with an employee record to track time.

Design example of a tooltip
Document discussing problems with tracking employee time in QuickBooks Online, current workaround solutions, and ideal states for improving time tracking and employee management.

I worked to understand the problem at a deeper level, and learned that we actually had multiple problems with multiple potential solutions.

Three steps outlining customer problem solutions

Near-term solution

I designed a near-term solution that would surface an existing workaround that easily addressed most of these admins’ immediate need: just create an employee record for the admin, and track time to that.

I worked with a content designer to make this rich tooltip interaction as clear as possible, and with developers to make sure the interaction was quick and painless.

Warning message window with yellow warning icon, indicating that a user's time entry is not synced with QuickBooks and she needs an employee record to sync time entries, with a link to create an employee.

Clicking the “Create employee” link kicked off an auto-create action in the background, and after a brief spinner the admin would be ready to track time and sync with the newly created record linked to their admin user profile.

Instructions on creating and editing employee records in QBO, including auto-creation when first and last name are provided, and manual entry with validation errors if names are missing or invalid. Screenshots show the process, pop-up forms, and disabled save button.
Screenshots of time tracking software showing clock-in and clock-out times for employees, with indicators for support calls and employee work hours.

As implemented in production:

Payroll dashboard screenshot showing time entries for employees, including hours worked, overtime, paid time off, unpaid time off, breaks, billable hours, total hours, status, and actions.

Moving on to the next customer problem

Next, I designed a way for admins who had already gotten into a bad state to manage their records and easily eliminate unintentional duplicates.

A presentation slide showing a solution for detecting and merging duplicate user profiles in a system. It includes two screenshots of a user interface with tools for managing user accounts, a near-term solution paragraph, and notes on future improvements.

Solving for the long-term

After making our software work for existing admins who were struggling to get what they needed from our time-tracking feature, it was time to plan for the Ideal State. The lead developer and I had talked this through earlier, but identified it as a big architectural lift that would work best as a second iteration once other back-end pieces were ready.

These final designs paved the way for a smoother workflow that set admins on the right track before they ever got into a bad state in the first place.

Flowchart showing steps to solve the root problem in employee ID system for time tracking, including ideal and error states, with instructions for handling admin and non-primary admin cases.