Reimbursement for DAOs, built on top of Parcel's existing payroll, payments, and bookkeeping.
Product: Parcel, a payments platform for crypto orgs
Role: Sole designer → research, concept, design, delivery
Team: 1 designer (me), 1 PM, 3 engineers
Timeline: 3 weeks core release, then phased delivery
Outcome: Shipped as a new module on the platform, helped land 3 new clients and a ~20% revenue lift
Parcel was a finance platform for on-chain organizations, the kind of crypto-native company or DAO that pays a global.
By the time expense management reached me, the product had already lived three lives. It began as payroll, then grew a broader payments layer, then bookkeeping, so finance leads could actually account for what left the treasury. Expense management was the fourth thing we shipped.
When a contributor wanted reimbursing for something they'd bought for the org, the options were all improvised. Someone would drop a receipt screenshot in a Discord channel, a treasury signer would eyeball it, and eventually money went out of a multisig wallet, tracked in a spreadsheet that mostly lived in one person's head. That was fine when the org was five people. At fifty it stopped working, and the request, the approval, and the payout had no thread connecting them.
What kept this from being a generic CRUD build was that we weren't starting from zero. We already knew every contributor, because they'd been onboarded for payroll. We already had the rails to move money on-chain. We already had a bookkeeping layer that understood how to categorize a transaction. Expense management didn't need to reinvent any of that. It needed to compose it. So most of my early thinking was less about which screens an expense tool should have, and more about how little we could add on top of what was already there.
Before this existed, reimbursing a DAO contributor meant a receipt dropped in Discord, a spreadsheet, and someone manually firing a transaction from a multisig. Fine at five people. Broken at fifty.