№ 02, SAAS PLATFORM DESIGN
A white-label operations platform that unifies billing, payments, inventory, and customers into one view, and closes the gap between invoicing and getting paid.
COMPANY
CashJar — Invoisure (Cloud-based SaaS)
DURATION
2 years (discovery through build, pre-launch at handover)
TEAM
1 Product Designer (me), CEO, 2 frontend & 2 backend developers
MY ROLE
End-to-end Product Designer, owning UX strategy and the design system
THE PROBLEM
Merchants ran expanding businesses on disconnected tools, and the gaps between them cost real money.
Billing, payment collection, inventory, and customer data each lived in a separate system. That meant invoices built by hand, payments missed or collected late from poor tracking, and hours lost consolidating data. With no central view of sales, stock, or finances, merchants couldn't act in real time, and the friction quietly capped their growth.
THE CHALLENGE
Unify billing, payments, inventory, and customers into one platform, for three different audiences, without making it rigid.
The system had to handle one-time invoices, recurring billing, and product sales while supporting white-label branding. I designed for three user groups at once, admins who configure the system, merchants who run daily operations, and customers who receive and pay invoices, so the architecture had to stay customizable and consistent while making intricate financial data easy to use.
MY APPROACH & PROCESS
I started by mapping how merchants actually work, to find where the time was really going: manual steps, data stuck in separate tools, and constant switching between systems.
I structured the platform around who does what: setup for admins, daily operations for merchants, and simple paying for customers, all under each merchant's own branding.
I built a design system that let each merchant apply their own branding while keeping the product consistent and fast to build across all three types of users.
I handed developers complete, detailed designs for every part of the platform and worked with them to keep the build true to the design, plus a marketing site to support launch.
KEY SCREENS
SIGNALS & FEEDBACK
Owner buy-in
The CEO backed the design direction and singled out the Smart Insights concept as the guidance layer he wanted merchants to have.
Design and dev, in sync
Working side by side with the frontend and backend teams, I solved layout and data problems as they came up, so the shared platform held together without hurting the merchant experience.
An honest tradeoff
Smart Insights was too big for the team's current capacity, so we built solid reporting first and another team picked it up later.
KEY INSIGHT
Putting every merchant on the same system makes it efficient to run, but it can quietly strip away the brand each one has worked to build. The real challenge was making one shared platform still feel like it belonged to each merchant, so their customers always saw their business, never the software underneath.
THE SOLUTION
I designed Invoisure as a platform that runs a merchant's daily operations, keeps their branding intact, and shortens the time between sending an invoice and getting paid. It connects four areas: the Merchant Dashboard shows how the business is doing at a glance, Customer Management keeps every client's details and billing history in one place, Payment & Invoicing handles both one-time and recurring bills to get merchants paid faster, and Email Templates make every automated message look like it came from the merchant, not from generic software.
IMPACT & OUTCOMES
Merchants get paid faster
One-time and recurring invoicing plus automated email/SMS reminders shorten the gap between billing and collection, the platform's core business case.
Fragmented tools unified
The admin panel, merchant portal, and customer payment screens came together as one branded platform, so nobody has to jump between tools or piece data together by hand.
One operational view
A single dashboard that brings together sales, inventory, and finances that used to live in separate, disconnected tools.
Foundation for Smart Insights
Central reporting and history became the base for the smarter, suggestion-driven insights a later team built on.
WHAT I LEARNED
Automate the switch: moving old data in is a huge hurdle. Next time I'd build tools that read a merchant's existing data automatically and save hours of manual entry.
Make onboarding adapt: one-size tutorials get skipped. I'd design setup that adjusts to each merchant's type of business and helps them right where they need it.
Testing live saves build time: instead of waiting for the next round of development, I'd adjust tricky workflows with users right there in the session.
Scale branding without breaking things: letting merchants apply their own look is a delicate balance. I'd automate the theming so their branding never breaks the core product.
From data to next steps: clean dashboards are just the start. The real win is moving from reports about the past to clear suggestions about what to do next.