spending insights and
billing setup for schools
status: MVP shipped, V1 in development
role: design lead
challenge
user challenge
School decision-makers and requestors often manage substitute budgets with limited visibility into spending, usage, or progress toward budget goals. Many rely on guesswork and simple spreadsheets—if they track spending at all—because this user group is less comfortable with technology. As a result, spending tends to be overly cautious and decisions are often misinformed. We believe that giving admins access to clear spend metrics will promote confident, data-driven spending.
business challenge
We want to position ourselves as partners to school admins during our sales pitch. If we can approach the conversation knowing their total substitute budget, we can go in with an understanding of the opportunity size and increase Swing’s statement of work with existing accounts.
Alongside budget insights, we want to build a robust billing portal. While modernizing the admin app, we scoped out the billing portal and almost all billing happens off platform in spreadsheets and a third party app called “Zuora”. By bringing this visibility into the platform, we’re hoping to boost trust.
exploration
MVP
Now that we had a north star, we needed to find our starting point. The easiest way to get admins this information while continuing to refine the outputs was through an email.
Without access to budget data, we used “lock” icons to prompt users to share data through a linked survey. However, even in direct conversations, most were unwilling to share - limiting our ability to provide meaningful budget insights.
iteration
We pivoted to displaying spend metrics based on known account data, eliminating the need for schools to input their budget data. This version’s card-based design enables a modular approach to building out the “Trends” tab.
Below is the latest desktop iteration of the “Setup” tab, designed to allow admins to categorize spend (after-school programs, special education, etc). This direction evolved through user feedback and iteration, in collaboration with a PM and engineer. This design is set to launch in Sep 2025.
