MOTION
UX/UI
Prototype
Role Product Designer
Company Tula (Concept)
Platform iOS · Fintech
Overview
Building a business from the ground up is stressful, and for most first-time owners, money is the most stressful part of it. In a 2025 survey, 64% of small business owners named finances as the hardest part of running their business.¹ Those who can’t afford an accountant have to do their own books, on top of everything else the business asks of them.
Tula was created to answer that question. It’s a financial app for first-time small business owners that brings calm, mindful practices into everyday money tasks, easing the stress of keeping their own books.
This case study looks at how Tula’s promise holds up in a single user flow: uploading a batch of expenses at once. Owners scan a pile of receipts in one sitting. Tula reads and sorts them, then asks only about the details it couldn’t read. The project is conceptual and builds on a brand identity I created for Tula in December 2025. After defining the brand, I wanted to test whether its calm, confident voice could carry through a real product flow. What follows covers the problem, the iterations along the way, and the final flow, shown through screen recordings of the Figma prototype.
¹ Nav, Mapping Mental Health in Small Business Ownership, survey of 1,000+ US small business owners, October 2025. Source
The problem
To ground the design, I created a proto-persona based on common first-time owner experiences. Jon runs JonJon’s BonBons, a small-batch chocolate business he started from his home kitchen two years ago. He sells at a farmers market, on Etsy and to two local coffee shops, so money comes in from every direction, and his receipts end up in a shoebox. Jon has no clear picture of where his business stands, and each new receipt makes it harder to look. Tax season is the only time he finds out.
Iteration
The “How might we” question led to five principles for the design. Tula should meet Jon in the mess and accept the shoebox as it is. It should show progress in plain language and make the good months visible by showing what he kept after real costs. And it should guide him with calm copy, with no red or shaming language anywhere in the interface.
Early wireframes explored where the flow should begin, how the camera should handle many receipts at once, and how the Home screen could reflect Jon’s progress. From these explorations, here are 3 key decisions that were made to ensure the Brand Identity and values came through in the flow.
01
DeCIsion
A card that opens when it's needed
Each receipt appears as a collapsed card showing the merchant, amount, date and category, which is enough to confirm it at a glance. Tapping a card expands it into the full details and the scanned image, so the extra information is there only when Jon wants to check or edit something.
02
DeCIsion
Missing Information comes first
Receipts that Tula couldn’t fully read sit at the top of the list, under a short line saying how many need a look. Jon deals with the few receipts that need his input before anything else, and the rest of the list is already done.
03
DeCIsion
Submit all at once
The first review screen was a carousel that showed one receipt at a time, so 27 receipts meant 27 separate confirmations, even though Tula had read 25 of them correctly. The final design adds a Submit button at the top that confirms every receipt that looks right in one tap. Jon can still confirm receipts one by one if he wants to, and the counter shows his progress either way.
The Solution
The final flow moves through four stages: capture, analysis, review and done. Every transition moves at the pace of a slow breath and settles gently into place, so each screen leads calmly into the next.
Capturing the shoebox
Jon taps the camera button on Home and scans his receipts one after another.
A soft flash confirms each capture. When he’s done, Tula takes over.
Balance in progress
While Tula reads the receipts, a set of rings expands and contracts at the pace of a slow breath.
Reviewing what Tula found
A notification lets Jon know the work is done. The review list opens with the two receipts Tula couldn’t fully read. He adds the missing details, and each card moves into the list of receipts that look right.
Confirming a receipt
Tapping the circle on a card checks it off. The card gains a green stroke, slides out of the list, and the counter at the top goes down by one, giving Jon the small satisfaction of crossing something off.
Submitting everything at once
For the receipts that already look right, one tap on Submit confirms them all.
The cards check off in a cascade until the list is clear.
Balance restored
Tula closes the flow with a summary of Jon’s expenses for the quarter, revealed category by category.
Back on Home, a spending graph card is revealed to visualise the submitted expenses.
The OUTCOMES
A clear ending shapes every step that leads to it
This project began as a brand, and the question was whether Tula’s calm, confident voice could hold up inside a real product flow. I designed a path that takes Jon from a box of unopened receipts to a clear summary of his quarter, asking for his input only where it’s needed. The motion, the copy and the structure of each screen all work toward the same feeling of relief, and they show that the brand’s voice can carry through the product.
The biggest lesson came from the process itself. I spent weeks redesigning the first screens of the flow without making progress, and things only moved once I designed the end. After that, every earlier step had something to lead toward. I also learned how much tone shapes a financial product. A single label like “Unknown Vendor” can make a calm app feel like an audit, and a question like “Who was this from?” can make the same gap feel easy to fill.
From here, future work would bring the same approach to invoicing for Jon’s wholesale accounts, a tax set-aside that grows a little with every sale, and the edge cases a real product would face, such as duplicate receipts, offline captures and blurry photos. Testing the flow with real small business owners would also show where assumptions hold and where they need to change. The goal stays the same: managing finances should feel less like drowning, and more like breathing.