Accounting
Paperchase had a powerful accounting platform, but its nearly 20-year-old experience had become difficult to navigate. We reworked it around how restaurant operators actually work, making everyday financial tasks clearer, faster and easier to manage at scale.
Paperchase is a hospitality accounting firm serving restaurants across the US, UK and Middle East, with a large back office in Ahmedabad. Alongside its accounting service, it gives clients a software portal for managing everyday financial tasks.
In 2022, Paperchase approached Paperclip to rethink its nearly 20-year-old platform and make it easier to use.
Problem
eDocs and the dashboard put too much information on screen, making important details harder to find.
Related tasks like invoice approval and payment were split across different areas, while cash-up required long, accuracy-critical data entry.
The experience wasn't built for high-volume, multi-location operations, with permissions and workflows needing to be repeated across restaurants.
What needed to change
The portal was organised around the accounting system, rather than the way restaurant operators actually worked.
As Paperchase grew, the experience needed to support higher volumes, multiple locations and different users without adding more complexity.
The goal was simple: make the portal feel like a tool for getting work done, not another system to work around.
Strategy
We started with a full usability audit and stakeholder conversations, then ran user research across each module. The strategy focused on three principles:
Show users only what they need to complete the task.
Break longer workflows into smaller, understandable steps.
Build for high-volume work, multiple locations and repeat tasks from the start.
Design
Separated upload and viewing, with PDFs split into pages and thumbnails.
Broke long data entry into smaller, trackable steps.
Simplified the view to primary KPIs, with detail when needed.
Introduced reusable roles and permissions across locations.
Outcome
The redesigned portal gave Paperchase a clearer, more task-focused experience built around the realities of restaurant operations.
Users could move through everyday financial work with less friction, while the product was better equipped to support high-volume, multi-location clients.
The change made the portal a stronger part of the Paperchase service.
It moved the product from being a place where clients accessed accounting information to a tool that helped them get their financial work done faster, supporting the same scale and quality that Paperchase had built into its service.
