User story
As a farmer I want to be able to view the most important financial aspects of my farm at a glance so that I can quickly understand where my business stands
Why?
Farmers need to understand how profitable their operations are to run a successful business. Right now, farmers get a glance at this with the whole farm balance - but it’s a bit of a dead-end for them. There’s no way to drill down to understand how these numbers came to be.
This experience is a bit disjointed from two perspectives:
High level takeaways on the holistic “health” of the farm
The nuts and bolts of daily expenses of the farm
The finances dashboard is meant as a way to understand both of these qualities on the same page. It also gives the user the ability to navigate to other pages for more specific information.
Assumptions
Functional Requirements:
Must-have:
Define a date range over which the dashboard data should be generated using commonly needed reporting timeframes, e.g. “Current year”, “Last year”, “Current week”, “Last week”, etc.
Ability to define filter criteria for …
Revenue types (including custom revenue types)
Expense types (including custom expense types)
Ability to search the transaction list for any visible attributes of the transaction (e.g. name, type, amount)
Top level indicators clearly defining …
Current revenues & projected revenues matching the filter criteria
Current expenses & projected expenses matching the filter criteria
Current profit / loss and projected profit / loss matching the filter criteria
A table showing all transactions (revenue and expenses) matching the filter criteria
Ordered in reverse chronological order
Clicking the head for each column reverses the sort order
Crop sales should be specially “bundled”
Labour expenses should be specially “bundled” such that all labour expenses for a given day are shown together
Nice-to-have:
Ability to define filter criteria for amount of transaction, setting both upper and lower bound
Adaptive design (as opposed to responsive), e.g.
Ability to view additional columns on Desktop vs. mobile
Differing indicator layout based on screen dimensions
Spotlight for how bundles work
“Drawer” filter design
Expanding and withdrawing search bar design
User interaction and design
Questions and answers
Question | Answer |
|---|---|
What is the general pattern for each line item on the Financials dashboard? | Headers:  Mobile ☝️  Desktop ☝️ Line items: If expense:
 If revenue:
 |
Does it makes the most sense to aggregate all crop sales for a particular day together into one “bundled” item, rather than displaying them as potentially dozens of individual transactions on the same day? | No! Reasoning is that the user can already add as many crops to each instance of the crop sale revenue as they would like. Our bundling on the finances dashboard should mirror the way the user creates the revenue. |
How should crop sale bundles be displayed? |  “Transaction” = <Customer> & <Date> “Type” = “Crop sale” (In the general case the type of revenue or expense) |
Does it makes the most sense to aggregate all labour expenses for a particular day together into one “bundled” item, rather than displaying them as potentially dozens of individual transactions on the same day? | Yes! The existing screens to view labour expenses by person or task lend themselves well to daily bundles (though “View all labour expenses >” should be removed).  |
What does the “>” arrow on each line item do? | For individual expenses and revenues, it navigates them to the read-only detail page for that transaction. For labour expense “bundles” it navigates them to the existing labour expense homepage. update -Loic Sans is looking at a different icon or method than “>” to do this, but the user does need the ability to access the read-only detail page from the Finances dashboard |
For crop sales with “…” “+ X”, how would we view those additional lines?  | update - For crop sale, it would navigate them to the crop sale read only detail page. For labour expenses, it would navigate the user to the labour expenses page. |
What happens when a user clicks on projected revenue on the finances dashboard? | TBD; there will be 2 types of futures revenues shortly:
|
Should “estimated harvests” be shown as future revenues? If so, how do we treat this side by side with future crop sales? | |
Should the finances dashboard show future revenues and expenses? How? | Probably! The how is a TBD |
If there are future revenues and expenses shown on the finances page - how are they ordered amongst current and past transactions? Current ordering is most recent first | |
Do the finances KPIs update for the selected time period?  | Yes! |
Out of scope
Clickable indicators