Receipt review

Helped the operations team review receipts 40% faster, saving 100s of hours, or ~$250k in overhead.

Level receipt review dashboard

Problem

Level’s vision was to deliver dental, vision and any employee benefit all via 1 card. So in 2022, engineering rebuilt the core transaction engine to support lifestyle spending accounts like Vanguard’s Flexfund. But, this new backend introduced massive processing bottlenecks and headaches for our Transactions Ops team.

  1. 40% of all system transactions (~180k/year) failed automated processing and required human intervention.
  2. ~120k of those manual transactions required explicit receipt review.
  3. 5 Ops associates spent 65 hours combined every week manually reviewing receipts, costing ~$250k/year.
  4. The legacy workflow was slow, fragmented, and unpredictable. Hiring more staff to scale was financially unsustainable.

Solution

Deliver a fast, short-term UI overhaul while leadership evaluated long-term OCR/ML automation.

  1. Split-View Modal Pattern: Designed a new component featuring a high-powered receipt preview on the left, paired with an optimized data entry form on the right.
  2. Smart Categorization & Focus: Placed suggested merchant categories above input fields and allowed users to skip or queue complex receipts to maintain momentum.
  3. Safety & Fallbacks: Built-in duplicate transaction alerts, invalid receipt flags, and an “eject” option back to legacy UX for edge cases.
  4. Execution & Rollout: Handed off via interactive Figma prototypes and video walkthroughs; validated via a 1-week A/B test monitored in FullStory before rolling out to all 12 Ops associates.

Outcomes

  1. Ops associates reviewed receipts 40% faster on average.
  2. $250k+ Annualized Savings: Reduced thousands of manual human hours, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  3. Auto-Processing Lift: Contributed to moving automated transaction processing from 60% toward a 70% target by late 2023.
  4. Design System Reuse: Established reusable split-view and file-preview UI patterns for future internal admin workflows.

Reflection

  1. Automation is Hard: Training OCR/ML models requires thousands of clean, labeled receipts—making immediate UX interventions far more cost-effective in the short term.
  2. Inclusion Drives Adoption: Involving Ops teammates deeply throughout research, prototyping, and testing built the trust necessary for seamless product adoption.
  3. Designing for Efficiency with Empathy: Streamlining repetitive internal tasks frees teams from low-value work, but structural tech shifts require thoughtful change management.