Staying compliant

across the globe

Annual accounts landing page with header "Review and finalise your accounts without leaving QuickBooks" and three benefits bullet points, with a decorative graphic of a lady in a blue sweater with a laptop to the right

The problem

Accountants in the UK need to file something called annual accounts as part of the tax prep process.

To stay compliant, the docs they prepare and submit to the government have to include specific info, follow a certain structure, and include a prescribed tagging scheme.

QuickBooks Online Accountant needed to include a feature for preparing these docs to stay compliant and competitive.

Solution

We made it happen: an annual accounts preparation tool for accountants in the UK, including structured document editing and prefilled fields.

Here’s an overview on the QuickBooks support site that shows the feature in action: Prepare your annual accounts using Workpapers in QuickBooks Online Accountant

My role

As the sole content designer on the work, I was emzedded in the design process from discovery to execution.

This included plenty of research with accountants, getting cozy with UK terminology and tax regulations, partnering closely with XD, PM, and PD, and driving product content for the actual user flows.

Challenges

Naming: Workpapers? Prep for taxes? Annual accounts? Statutory accounts? Different stakeholders call these spaces and processes different things, which seeded the ground for total ambiguity.

I talked to a variety of actual accountants in the UK to find out what was most clear to them, and made sure to understand the legal implications to land on the term “annual accounts.” It’s two words but they’re important, so I was thorough about documenting and socializing that decision to drive clarity.

Internationalization: I’m US-based, so the nuances of UK English aren’t instinctive. I made sure to leverage all the tools at my disposal including reference materials, the Writer AI tool, and content design partners in the UK to make sure my cadence, grammar, spelling, word choice, and all those delicious details sounded just right.

Compliance: Tax law is serious business. I studied annual accounts filing processes and language according to HMRC, asked one million questions of our accounting consultant partners, and carefully aligned our language with legal expectations.

Tech constraints: We couldn’t build everything we wanted in the time we had available, so we prioritized and negotiated with our partners to hone in on the most critical functions and features for accountants to do their annual accounts.

Results

In building out annual accounts prep tools for accountants in the UK, we set the stage for continued growth and exploration for accountants in the UK market, especially in the context of workpapers and books to taxes.

After build, we packaged and handed this work off to another team who continued to build on the capabilities and get us closer to our goals in the space.