Adsum

VAT Refunds - Fast!

Adsum provides accountants and businesses with innovative tools to streamline VAT, PAYE, and corporation tax management—spending less time on busywork and more time driving growth.

Challenge

Adsum, a successful UK FinTech startup, needed specialist UX design help to completely redesign their digital product. The challenge was taking complex FinTech functionality and making it ultra-simple for accountants and business owners to understand their business finances quickly and clearly. Beyond the core platform redesign, Adsum needed a scalable foundation that could support multiple products layered on top—including integrations with Xero and QuickBooks.

Impact

Precode redesigned Adsum's core SaaS platform in just two 5-day UX Sprints (10 days total). The scalable design system created still forms the bedrock of Adsum's platform today. Since the initial engagement, multiple additional products have been designed including Instant VAT, specialist accountancy tools, corporation tax features, and partnership integrations with Xero and QuickBooks—all building seamlessly on that original foundation. The modular design approach allowed Adsum to continuously expand their offering without requiring platform-wide redesigns.

How we helped

•User research
•Market Research
•Wireframing - Low-fidelity, high-fidelity
•UX design
•Design system
•Prototyping
•User testing

Web UI Design

App UI Design

Branding

Approach

Pre-flight

Two hour meeting the week before the sprint to meet the team, discuss the project brief, walkthrough the current registration and onboarding process, confirm the deliverables and obtain any necessary assets before the first day of the sprint.

Daily calls

Every morning there was a 15 minute stand up with the Adsum team.

Show & Tell

At the end of each day, an email was sent with a link to a prototype plus a video screencast of the work presented to the Adsum team.

Prototyping

Prototypes were preferred over presentations—allowing the Adsum team to walk through user journeys instead of viewing a set of static screens.

Handover

Three rounds of user testing were performed and recorded. The video recordings, feedback and results were made available to the Adsum team, and written up into a user testing report.