In a context where companies seek to operate with agility, efficiency and traceability, per diem management remains one of the most cumbersome and bureaucratic processes in the corporate world. While other areas advance towards digital transformation, this key aspect of the daily operation continues anchored in Excel payroll, printed tickets and manual circuits that slow down the workflows and wears the equipment.
Why do we continue to drag these inefficiencies? In many organizations, expense surrender systems were designed with a single focus: control. Designed by administration and compliance areas, these processes completely forgot to those who suffer most: the collaborator. That is, the person who must pay expenses after a working day or in the middle of a job trip, while fulfilling their tasks and fighting with tight times.
The result is known: employees that must print vouchers, complete forms, scan, send, wait approvals, re -load data and justify each weight spent. This process not only consumes time and energies, but discourages formality, delays reimbursements and pushes informal solutions that end up affecting the traceability that is sought to preserve so much.
A user -centered logic
Instead of imposing administrative tools, from Kuru we decided to take a total turn, we set out to listen first to the user. Each functionality that we develop is born as a hypothesis, is tested in short cycles with real users and only after. This approach, inherited from agile development, avoids unnecessary investments in systems that nobody wants to use and allows to build solutions that evolve with the true needs of the business.
Far from what is thought, innovation does not collide with control: it enhances it. Validating each step, designing from empathy and reducing frictions are strategies that improve the adoption of tools, reduce human error and allow auditing the entire process in real time. Why continue building solutions for “collaborators” when we could be designing for “users”?
Design Thinking for Finance
If the e-commerce and logistics completely reinvented their link with the user, why not do the same with corporate finances? Apply design of design, creativity and empathy to financial processes allows you to get out of vertical logic and impose a horizontal look, focused on those who live the processes day by day.
Therefore, we design a solution that works from WhatsApp: a comfortable, known and friction platform. There was no need for a new app: it was necessary to understand that the collaborator’s time is valuable and that paying expenses should not become a load. Solving from where they are already – without downloads or additional learning – is part of the user -centered design.
More efficiency, without losing control
One of the most common errors in the traditional per diem management is to demand time that the equipment does not have, for processes that do not understand. This generates tension, loss of operational focus and, what is more serious, a hidden cost that is rarely measured clearly.
A wrong belief persists in many financial areas: that innovating is giving up control. Reality is exactly the opposite. Today there are tools that record each transaction in real time, which automate approvals and that allow auditing without adding bureaucracy. The problem, then, is not technical: it is conceptual. It is born from a logic centered on the form and not on the person.
The solution does not happen to digitize what no longer works. It goes through rethinking the entire process from scratch, with focus on people. Because in a world where nobody wants to waste time in unnecessary processing, designing for efficiency is also designing for experience.
Juan Pablo Picasso, Chief Information Officer & Co-Fount de Kuru
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By Juan Pablo Picasso
