QuidPro

I did not arrive at QuidPro as a designer. I arrived as an auditor. A few of us left a financial audit firm together in 2019 to build the thing we had all quietly wished existed: a self-built, automated auditor, delivered as a web app, that would do the tedious part of our old jobs without us. QuidPro’s promise, still on its site today, is that prevention is better than cure. It watches a company’s transactions in near real time and flags the likely mistakes before the payments go out.

what it caught

The app was built for accounting departments and for the CFOs above them. Its work was the unglamorous list every finance team knows by heart: erroneous payments, duplicated payments, credit notes that were issued and then forgotten, the small leaks that add up to a real number by year end. An auditor finds those months later, with a sample and a spreadsheet. QuidPro was meant to find them the same morning, with everything.

Coming from the audit side, I knew what the users were afraid of missing. What I did not yet know was how to put that on a screen.

the sidebar

This is where I got into UI design, and where I got serious about SCSS and JavaScript, while learning the ropes of C# and Razor from a colleague who knew them far better than I did. The piece of work I am proudest of is the sidebar. That sounds small. It was not. The version before it looked and behaved like software from another decade, and navigating an audit tool is most of the job: which entity, which period, which rule set, which exceptions are still open. Getting that one surface to feel calm and obvious changed how the whole product felt, and it taught me that meaningful UX usually lives in the boring parts.

Alongside the app I designed and built the marketing site. Its job was straightforward: sell to finance teams and to the companies above them, and show the value of a service whose product is, essentially, well-organised suspicion. The tone I landed on was demonstrative rather than alarming. Show people what they would have caught.

how it ended

The project ended in 2022 because the budget was depleted and no clients were yet lined up. There is no dramatic version of that story. A good product, built carefully, met a sales pipeline that had not caught up with it.

What I took from QuidPro is most of how I work today. Delegation, because a small team building a large product cannot afford heroics. Constant refactoring, because the code that catches other people’s errors cannot afford its own. Test-driven development, for the same reason. And a conviction that beautiful, meaningful UX and interfaces that anyone can understand are not decoration on top of the engineering but the point of it. The sidebar was the first time I proved that to myself.