Contributions
Product strategy
User research
Product design
Team
1 product designer
1 product manager
1 tech lead
2 front-end engineers
1 QA
Overview
When it came to exporting expenses, Pleo only supported a limited number of formats, each mapped to the most common accounting systems on the market. For companies using anything outside that list, admins had no way to retrieve their financial data from Pleo in a format they could import into their accounting system.
This was a market problem as much as a product problem. The sales team knew it. Pleo was a harder sell for any company whose accounting setup didn't match the supported formats.
Approach
The concept was originally prototyped by our tech lead during one of Pleo's hackathons, and from there I took it into a fully designed solution.
The solution let admins define their own CSV export format directly in Pleo. Using a familiar spreadsheet-style interface, admins could configure the fields and structure their accounting system needed without having to deal with any of the technical complexity behind it.
We tracked adoption and kept a close ear on customer feedback coming through our sales and customer success teams.
Outcome
Custom exports opened Pleo up to a much wider range of customers and markets. Companies that previously couldn't become Pleo customers due to accounting system incompatibility now had a way in. For the sales team, it was a meaningful unlock, shifting Pleo from a product that worked for some finance teams to one that could work for any of them.
What happened next
Custom exports removed one of the key blockers for selling Pleo more widely, giving the sales team the confidence that the product could work for any company regardless of their accounting setup.
