Overview

At Spotlight Reporting, I led the UX design for a key SaaS feature — Consolidated Forecasting — enabling businesses to forecast across up to 75 entities. This high-impact project helped enterprise users save time, reduce manual errors, and gain clarity on group-level cash flow performance. My work involved leading user research, shaping the product strategy, and designing scalable, user-friendly interfaces for a complex financial problem.

As the company’s only designer at the time, I introduced UX best practices like prototyping, user testing, and design-led collaboration, helping shift the product team toward a more user-centred approach.

The Challenge

Spotlight had been an early innovator in cloud forecasting, but many of its customers had since grown more complex. Large accounting firms and multi-entity businesses needed a way to forecast across entities, not just within them.

• Many customers operated with 2 to 70 entities.
  

• Existing forecasting tools were too rigid and single-entity focused.
  

• Users struggled to get a true group-level view of cash flow and performance.
  

• Manual workflows were prone to error and took too much time.
  

The Process

As lead designer, I took ownership of both the user experience strategy and the UI design. Key parts of my process:

• Prototyping before development: I introduced an interactive prototyping phase to test ideas early and get internal alignment faster.
  

• User testing and validation: I led research sessions with accountants and finance users to validate both the problems and the usability of our solutions.
  

• Close collaboration: I worked directly with developers and product specialists to ensure designs were both technically feasible and aligned with user needs.
  

• System design: I helped evolve the design system to support complex, data-heavy components like the consolidated grid.
  

Designing for complexity taught me that clarity is everything. Working on Consolidated Forecasting pushed me to think not just about interfaces, but about mental models — how users understand scale, structure, and flow. I realised that great UX isn’t always about simplifying the surface, but about giving users confidence to navigate complexity with control.

The Solution: Consolidated Forecasting

The flagship feature I helped bring to life was Consolidated Forecasting, which allowed users to create forecasts across multiple related entities and understand their group-level financial outlook.

Key UX challenges:

• Selecting which accounts and entities to include in the forecast
  

• Managing a large volume of line items across multiple businesses
  

• Visualising high-density financial data without overwhelming the user
  

• Ensuring performance and usability for power users
  

Design solutions:

• Dynamic entity selection UI that allowed users to include/exclude organisations and specific accounts quickly.
  

• Flexible, scrollable data grid showing account-level breakdowns per entity (e.g. Revenue → Interest Income → All associated Orgs).
  

• Progressive disclosure patterns to surface key metrics while reducing cognitive load.
  

• Thoughtful information hierarchy and interaction design to guide users through setup, review, and export processes.
  

The Impact

While I don’t have access to exact usage metrics, the feature launched successfully and was adopted by several high-profile enterprise customers. Internally, the design approach I introduced helped:

• Reduce friction between design and development
  

• Shorten the time from idea to validated prototype
  

• Improve internal confidence in usability before build
  

The Consolidated Forecasting feature is still being used today, helping businesses make faster, data-backed decisions across complex entity structures.