Finario is the capex planning platform large enterprise finance teams actually run their capital programmes through. I joined as the only product designer in January 2024, owning the design system, the platform's UX direction, and the redesign of investment cost management, approval workflows, data tables, and settings & permissions.
| Work package | Approved | Actual | Forecast | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site preparation | 1,420k | 1,388k | 1,395k | +1.8% |
| Refrigeration plant | 4,860k | 2,940k | 4,710k | +3.1% |
| Racking & MHE | 2,150k | 1,120k | 2,180k | −1.4% |
| Electrical & controls | 1,640k | 980k | 1,610k | +1.8% |
| Contingency | 1,830k | 372k | 1,705k | +6.8% |
| Total committed | 11,900k | 6,800k | 11,600k | +2.5% |
Most large companies still plan capital spending in spreadsheets, email threads and a SharePoint folder no one fully trusts. Finario is the purpose-built platform those teams move to. Investment requests, ROI modelling, approvals, forecasts and reporting all live in one place, sitting on top of whichever ERP the customer already runs.
The platform is used across 70+ countries and 30+ industries, from manufacturing to energy to consumer goods. The same screens have to work for a five thousand dollar line item and for a project worth several hundred million. Currencies, fiscal years, NPV, IRR, work breakdowns, multi-level approvals. The full finance vocabulary lives in the product, and the unit it organises around is the investment.
People sign off on real money in here. A confusing screen is more than annoying. It is an audit risk and sometimes a poor capital decision.
Capex lives in tables. Forecast curves, cost breakdowns, approval queues. Every read and every edit happens through dense, multi-column grids. Making those readable and editable was half the design problem.
Multiple currencies, multiple languages, deep org hierarchies, complex approval chains. Whatever ships has to hold up across all of it.
When I joined, the product worked. Customers got real value out of it. The problem was a decade of additive feature work, and you could feel that on every screen. Buttons everywhere, every option visible at once, and information hierarchies that made sense to whoever shipped that feature in 2017.
It was great if you used it every day. If you logged in once a month to approve a project or check a forecast, which is most users honestly, it was a lot. The job was not to dumb anything down. It was to make the same product feel obvious to people who do not live in it.
No clear primary action on most screens. New users could not tell what they were supposed to click. Veterans were running on muscle memory.
Submitting an investment, approving one, and forecasting on it all worked slightly differently depending on where in the app you were. Each surface had been designed by a different engineer in its own time.
No shared components, no tokens, no agreed patterns. Engineers had been making UI calls in the absence of a designer. Every new feature meant relitigating what a button, a table or a permission control should look like.
"This is where our financial truth lives. It should look like it knows that."
I am the only designer at Finario. No one above me, beside me, or under me. Every flow, screen, component, icon and micro-interaction in the product is mine, and so is the system underneath.
In practice I sit inside the product loop, not at the end of it. Scoping with PMs, pairing daily with engineering in a fully English-speaking US-based team, joining customer feasibility calls, and pushing the design system forward in parallel. It is not a hand-off role, and that is the part I like most about it.
The work breaks into five surfaces that have been running in parallel since day one, each feeding the design system underneath.
Investment cost management is where Finario earns its seat at the table. It is the screen finance teams open to reconcile what was forecast against what was committed and what was actually spent, often across hundreds of cost lines and several fiscal periods, in two or three currencies at once.
The first thing I did was put every screen of the product on one board. Investment forms, approval queues, forecast tables, dashboards, reports. The pattern was clear quickly. Every screen is some mix of the same five jobs. Orient, show data, filter, act, report. The screens did not agree on how to do any of them. Most of the wins came from getting them to agree, starting here.
An investment is the thing Finario was always about. Approvals, forecasts, cost lines and reports are different views into one. Once the cost management screen was rebuilt around that idea, the product stopped feeling like five separate apps stitched together.
Cost management is a table. So is the approval queue, the forecast view, the actuals reconciliation. I built one table system, with fixed columns, inline editing, currency-aware totals, keyboard navigation and drill-down, and the rest of the product inherited it. The win compounds every time a new feature ships.
I did not ship a redesigned screen until the basics were in place. Tokens, the type system, the core components. Q1 looked slow from the outside. Everything after Q1 was much faster, and engineering stopped having to invent UI in the middle of a sprint.
| Cost Line | M1 | M2 | M3 | M4 | M5 | M6 | Approved | Actual | Forecast | Var % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site Preparation | 120 | 140 | 160 | 180 | 200 | 220 | 1,420 | 1,388 | 1,395 | 1.8 |
| Refrigeration Plant | 0 | 0 | 480 | 620 | 720 | 800 | 4,860 | 2,940 | 4,710 | 3.1 |
| Racking & MHE | 0 | 0 | 0 | 210 | 340 | 410 | 2,150 | 1,120 | 2,180 | -1.4 |
| Electrical & Controls | 40 | 80 | 120 | 160 | 200 | 240 | 1,640 | 980 | 1,610 | 1.8 |
| Fire Suppression | 0 | 30 | 60 | 90 | 110 | 130 | 720 | 410 | 705 | 2.1 |
| Contingency | 10 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 1,830 | 372 | 1,705 | 6.8 |
| TOTAL | 170 | 260 | 840 | 1,290 | 1,610 | 1,850 | 13,220 | 7,210 | 12,305 | 2.5 |
| Work package | Approved | Actual | % Committed | Forecast | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ▸ Site preparation | 1,420k | 1,388k | 98% | 1,395k | +1.8% |
| ▾ Refrigeration plant | 4,860k | 2,940k | 60% | 4,710k | +3.1% |
| — Compressors & condensers | 3,120k | 2,010k | 64% | 3,040k | +2.6% |
| — Controls & integration | 1,740k | 930k | 53% | 1,670k | +4.0% |
| ▸ Racking & MHE | 2,150k | 1,120k | 52% | 2,180k | −1.4% |
| ▸ Electrical & controls | 1,640k | 980k | 60% | 1,610k | +1.8% |
| ▸ Contingency | 1,830k | 372k | 20% | 1,705k | +6.8% |
| Total committed | 11,900k | 6,800k | 57% | 11,600k | +2.5% |
| Before | → | After |
|---|---|---|
| No design system, every feature reinventing the basics | → | Tokens, components and patterns built from scratch |
| Engineers making UI calls in the absence of a designer | → | A designer in the loop from scoping to ship |
| A different table on every page | → | One table system, currency-aware and keyboard-first |
| Approval flows with modal hops and ambiguous state | → | A clear queue, clear status, clear next action |
| Settings scattered by which team shipped each toggle | → | One settings architecture, organised by how admins think |
| Customer feedback only via PMs | → | Designer in customer calls directly |
| A product that grew by accident | → | A product that feels intentional |
It felt slow at the time. Looking back, it was the single best decision I made. Everything after that quarter was noticeably faster, and the product started feeling consistent without me having to police it.
Hearing customers directly is different from reading a Notion summary. The way someone says "yeah, it's fine" when it clearly is not does not survive a second-hand telling.
I am in Slack with the engineers all day. We catch things together that would otherwise be a back and forth ticket. The closer the loop, the better the thing that ships.
I shipped patterns faster than I wrote them down. As the team grows, that gap will start to hurt. If I were starting over I would write the docs at the same time, not later.
I spent year one on craft and shipping. I would now love to be able to point at adoption and quality numbers. Easier to defend the work, easier to spot what is not landing.
A lot of where the product is going lives in my head and in conversations. Putting it on paper would let other people pull in the same direction without having to ask me every time.
When you are the only designer, the job is to make sure the product feels like one person made it.