Designing the Foundations of Working Capital at BILL
Small businesses don't wake up needing a loan. They wake up needing to make payroll, pay vendors, and keep cash flowing. I helped define BILL's working capital strategy by identifying invoice financing as the first product, then designing the shared lending infrastructure that laid the foundation for a broader working capital platform.
Role, Scope & Impact
In 2022, I joined BILL as the first designer on the newly formed Working Capital team. BILL moves roughly 1% of U.S. GDP (~$320B annually) through its network, creating a unique opportunity to embed lending directly into existing payment workflows.
The team's goal was to determine how BILL could use its payments network to help businesses access capital at the moment it became relevant. After evaluating multiple opportunities, we identified Invoice Financing as the first product and used it to establish the foundation for a broader working-capital platform.
Outcomes
0k+
Loans disbursed
$0.0B
Capital provided to SMBs
+$0M
Revenue generated
Invoice Financing became BILL's first working-capital product and established the shared lending foundation that future products could build upon.
My role
- Defined the working capital product vision alongside product and lending leadership
- Established the lending lifecycle from application through repayment and servicing
- Led research across SMBs, operations, risk, and compliance teams
- Partnered with design systems to build reusable lending capabilities that future working-capital products could inherit
- Designed the product experience across web, mobile web, iOS, and Android
- Prototyped future working-capital concepts
Evaluating the Working Capital Opportunity
I approached this as both a user and systems problem. Research with SMBs helped uncover how businesses think about capital, while conversations with operations, risk, compliance, and lending partners revealed the internal opportunities
Businesses don't look for capital at times of need, instead they plan for it
They are often well prepared ahead of the cashflow crunch, with larger companies sometimes planning more than a year in advance. And during planning, they often settle on a prioritized list of sources for capital. For larger lending products like term loans, or line of credit, planning was the window of opportunity.
Speed to market was inversely proportional to riskiness
Lending products on the payer's side are heavily regulated and that translates to slower roll-outs and in-product experimentation won't be easy without regulatory oversight.
BILL's internal processes weren't setup to handle loan management efficiently
Internally, the teams were operating in silos and there was no internal system that could act as the single source of truth for loan statuses to teams such as operations, credit risk and compliance.
Settling on invoice financing as the first working capital product
Before designing a lending product, we first needed to determine which opportunity offered the strongest combination of user impact, business potential, and speed to market.
Together with my product partner, I evaluated multiple working-capital opportunities against those dimensions to guide the recommendation.
Select product names to learn more
Invoice Financing
A short-term lending product that advances cash against unpaid invoices, helping businesses access money they have already earned.
Based on our research and evaluation framework, we recommended Invoice Financing as BILL's first working-capital product.
BILL already possessed a proprietary underwriting advantage
BILL processes billions of dollars in payment activity every year. Invoice Financing would allow BILL to leverage that rich source of behavioral data to assess risk more effectively than traditional lenders relying primarily on credit scores and financial statements.
It provided the fastest path to establishing lending infrastructure
Unlike heavier lending products such as term loans or lines of credit, Invoice Financing requires a simpler servicing model. Repayments, collections, compliance workflows, and operational processes could be established incrementally.
BILL could unlock the underserved receiver segment
Historically, receivers (400k+ businesses) on BILL sign up only to receive a payment. A significant portion of these receivers are very small or micro businesses. These businesses often struggle to obtain loans from traditional financial institutions such as banks due to their size and credit worthiness. But BILL, with their proprietary transaction data can underwrite them for low risk lending products and provide much needed access to credit.
Building Consensus Around Shared Lending Capabilities
The challenge was ensuring that the first working-capital product did not become a standalone feature. My research uncovered a broader opportunity: many of the capabilities required by Invoice Financing like application flows, servicing, repayment, and collections would also be required by future lending products.
So I proposed treating these capabilities as shared building blocks that could support multiple working-capital products over time. To gather feedback and build alignment, I created a design proposal that mapped the lending lifecycle and identified which capabilities could become reusable platform components. I then conducted a series of discussions with product, engineering, operations, risk, and compliance stakeholders to refine the approach and build a consensus.
Loan balance module
Example of a reusable servicing component that could support multiple lending products.
Balancing compliance and usability
Invoice Financing relied on an external lending partner whose regulatory and compliance requirements heavily influenced the application experience. For the initial launch, we settled on a minimal application experience that would adhere strictly to the lending partner's requirements, with subsequent phases incorporating more usability enhancements. This approach enabled us to build a smooth working relationship with the lending partner and use the data we gathered from the initial launch to advocate for enhancements to the application flow.
Identifying the right entry point in the payment flow
As for identifying the right entry point for the invoice financing flow, from the initial user research, we found out that businesses plan for cashflow needs in advance and that they usually have a list of prioritized sources of capital. For Invoice Financing to become a meaningful source of capital, it needed to appear before the business experienced cash flow pressure and before they began evaluating alternatives.
Money on the way email
Designing the lending infrastructure
Loan balances, repayment states, payment schedules, servicing actions, delinquency states, and account management experiences all shared common structures despite representing different financial products.
I partnered with BILL's design systems team to define reusable lending primitives that could support multiple products over time.
An example of the lending design system in action: the balance module scaling across use cases and products.
Extending Components Into Functional Modules
This workstream sparked an interest from the engineering team on extending the design system components into experience applets or modules that have baked in functionality. I led a jobs to be done workshop with cross functional stakeholders to identify key modules which could be turned into applets. Unfortunately this initiative had to be deprioritized due to scope.
Bringing working capital to mobile
One of the key lessons I carried forward from my time on QuickBooks was that small business owners are often far more willing to manage their business from a smartphone than product teams assume. BILL largely operated through a desktop-first experience with a companion mobile app. To quantify smartphone usage for the receiver segment, I partnered with the data science team to identify how many users accessed their invoice status from their mobile device. The data revealed that more than 60% of invoice-status requests came from mobile devices.
If businesses were already monitoring incoming payments on their phones, then access to working capital needed to exist in the same context. I designed and proposed a mobile optimized invoice financing application flow. This was rolled out first as a mobile-web based application, and later was built natively across iOS and Android OS. Since launch, more than 40% of all loans have been originated through mobile devices. The invoice approval notification became one of the most natural entry points for financing because it appeared in a moment when businesses were already thinking about incoming cash.
Beyond lending
This project revealed a larger opportunity. Businesses were not looking for financing in isolation. They were trying to manage cash flow, plan for upcoming payables, and make decisions about the future of their business.
This realization shaped my longer-term vision for working capital at BILL: integrating lending, payables, receivables, forecasting, and planning into a unified experience that helps businesses understand their options and make smarter financing decisions with confidence.
