Contributions
Product strategy
User research
Product design
Team
1 product designer
1 product manager
1 tech lead
1 front-end engineer
1 QA
Overview
Categories in Pleo are how the product connects everyday spending to a company's accounting system. When an employee makes a purchase, a category is assigned to that transaction, which in turn maps to an account number that bookkeepers use when exporting to their accounting system. Done right, it automates a meaningful part of the accounting process at the point of purchase rather than leaving it all for later.
The problem was that the category list in Pleo had always been fixed. Admins could attach account numbers to those categories, but the list itself wasn't editable. For many businesses, that rigidity was a real problem. The categories Pleo offered didn't necessarily map to a company's own chart of accounts, which meant that after every export, finance teams had to do additional manual work to reconcile the difference. On top of that, attaching account numbers to transactions was a manual process, something bookkeepers had to do one by one rather than something Pleo could handle for them.
Approach
The redesign gave admins the ability to create, edit and manage their own categories, so the structure inside Pleo could reflect how their business actually organised expenses rather than how Pleo had assumed it would.
At the core of the feature is the ability to automate the attachment of account numbers based on the merchant used for the purchase. When an employee buys something, Pleo uses the merchant information to automatically assign the right category and account number, so bookkeepers no longer need to categorise every transaction manually. For most cases, their job becomes reviewing rather than doing, which significantly reduces the time spent on routine accounting work.
We tracked adoption and monitored what the change enabled commercially, particularly for customers that had previously been a difficult fit.
Outcome
Finance teams could now use Pleo in a way that aligned with their accounting system as the source of truth, removing the leftover work that had previously followed every export. Adoption reflected the demand that had been latent, and teams engaged with the feature quickly. Like custom exports, this was a commercial milestone, giving the sales team a stronger case for customers whose chart of accounts hadn't fit the Pleo defaults.
What happened next
Custom categories expanded Pleo's compatibility and contributed to the success of Pleo as it continued to grow. In 2021, the area became the responsibility of the dedicated Bookkeeper experience team that was formed to continue developing this part of the product.
