The Spend Tracker That Saved 32+ Weekly Hours

Designed to unify reporting and drive faster decisions

Overview

Every month, buyers and investment teams across four agencies would sift through spreadsheets - each with its own quirks, formats, and formulas - to piece together a picture of how advertising spend was tracking against yearly commitments. It wasn’t just slow; it was stressful. Leadership needed answers they couldn’t get quickly, and those doing the heavy lifting were stuck in tools that didn’t talk to one another.

So we built a better way.

High-fidelity wireframe from early design iterations - prior to final styling and design system integration.

My Role

As Senior UX Analyst, I led the research and design of a centralised tracking platform that worked for everyone - from spreadsheet-savvy buyers to the CEO needing an answer before walking into a broadcaster meeting. I interviewed planners, analysts, and C-suite investment leads to understand their pressures and pain points. The challenge wasn’t just building a new tool - it was building trust across teams who’d been stuck in the old way for years.

Process

• Empathy first: Interviewed team members from all four agencies - as well as senior finance and investment leaders - to understand what was slowing them down and where their frustrations came from

• Making sense of the mess: Reviewed dozens of spreadsheet templates to map out different hierarchies, naming conventions, and reporting expectations, then prototyped a shared model that worked across teams

• Facilitated workshops to co-design flows that respected the way people actually worked, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all solution

• Prototyped and tested a dashboard that showed forecast vs actual spend, variance highlights, and automated alerts - so users could stop digging and start responding

• Worked closely with engineering to pull verified spend data directly from media buying platforms, removing manual lookups and improving accuracy across the board

Impact

• Reduced reporting overhead by ~96%, from 32+ hours per week to under 2

• Empowered investment leads and C-suite stakeholders with real-time visibility into spend performance - supporting faster decisions, mid-flight planning, and improved partner negotiations

• Unified agency workflows without compromising local data needs, driving platform adoption across teams previously reliant on manual processes

• Surfaced actionable variance insights between forecast and actual spend, streamlining strategic reviews and improving accuracy in client billing

Reflection

Designing this tool wasn’t about pixels - it was about trust. Convincing teams to abandon spreadsheets they’d shaped over years meant showing respect for their workflows, earning credibility through listening, and proving value quickly. What started as a reporting challenge became a story of alignment, collaboration, and clarity - from day-to-day operations to board-level decisions.