Solo by MYOB is an award-winning application that earned the AFR BOSS most innovative company award in 2025. The platform provides administrative, payment, and business management solutions tailored specifically for Australia's 1.2 million businesses sole traders.

Solo offers cutting-edge capabilities including contactless "Tap to Pay" technology that transforms smartphones into payment terminals, instant income and expense reconciliation, and built-in banking functionality. It was created as a comprehensive, unified platform for sole traders managing their businesses.

My role and the team

Solo began development in January 2024 with the ambitious target of release by December of that year. I was seconded to the project in April of that year and then asked to join permanently, becoming 1 of the 2 permanent Solo designers.

Once I joined the Solo team, I worked as the designer responsible for the core accounting side of the app, working end to end on initiatives encompassing income, expenses and payments. While I lead several key features throughout this project, but one that presented particularly interesting challenges was what the team came to call the 'income list.’

One of the core jobs in the app was to create visibility of income. Our Money in and Money out structure allowed users to see invoices and expenses but not track all of there spending and income.

The problem facing businesses

Imagine you've been paid for an invoice you sent to a client and they pay it. You're sitting down to look at your cash flow for the week. But your paid invoices isn't the only income that you've had come in. How do you know how much money you have? What is your expected income? And where has this money come from?

Solo was designed with the goal of making it easier for a single person to manage a business. This was not just about eliminating admin tasks but helping create clarity. A major issues for businesses is incoming cashflow management. 1 in 5 small businesses state that this is the main source of anxiety and in any given year, up to 60% of small businesses stated they’d experienced cashflow management problems stemming from visibility.

This problem was particularly acute for Sole traders - our target audience. Sole traders are business which are run by one person with no employees or partners. Management is then that much more difficult because it is just one person.

Understanding our customer's pain

The key challenge problem that sole traders faced was awareness - how do you make cashflow visible and easily accessible for Sole traders so they could act on it?

Using feedback and data from Sole traders who had been using other MYOB products as well as our initial project kickoff user interviews, we quickly discovered that the problem facing Sole traders was visibility over income. Without visibility over where money was coming from, sole traders had to jump between the different lists in the app, check individual invoices, and manually connect the dots to confirm what was paid and its source.

Alongside this, there was need for Sole traders to be able to record other sources of income outside of invoices such as interest from business accounts, additional cash injections or other money generated from assets owned. Without this, Sole traders would have to balance the books manually.

Hypothesising a solution

I began by facilitaitng a series of small workshops to help guide the cross functional team through framing the problem and solutions. As an outcome of these, we developed the hypothesis that the best way to solve the problem was to have a single list where all income could be viewed and other income could be added. This feature would likely be of high importance but low frequency - sole traders would not visit it often but it would highly important to know the state of there finances.

Working from this, I quickly generated basic requirements and wireframes for how both invoices and manually recorded income would work in the this income list. Using these, we narrowed down the information that we needed to show - the amount of money, what it’s source was and where it came from.

Integral to this was determining what information we had available to show to customers

Working through complexity

One of the features our users found useful was ability to add a bank account and match there records against real money. We created this visibility by landing on the idea of linking payments through all the income and expense artifacts. This way a sole trader could tap on any item in the income or expense list and then follow the path to see what that action originated

While manually recorded payments could be matched to an individual bank transaction, Solo include two payments services that were a major part of revenue generation. Both of these were configured to arrive in a bank account as one payment for multiple invoices.

This created a problem we needed to solve - if a sole traded refunded a customer, they could end up with a negative amount in the income list. This broke our mental model as it was money going out when that list should only show money going in. Along with this, we also needed to make it easy to see how much users were paying in fees.

Partnering with my senior developer, I worked through different design directions to identify potential solutions to balance user experience, feasibility, and cost. Working through the technical constraints on how we could pass the transaction data, we figured out we could attach multiple payments together and we could show the payments in the right list along with the right fees in the right place.

Running working sessions with the senior developer and business analyst, we worked to make the complex simple.

Design validation

After several UI iterations, we ran user interviews with existing sole traders to validate our solution and test our UI. The feedback highlighted the importance of this list and that this created the visibility sole traders needed. When seeing the ability to click through to matched transactions, one sole trader noted:

‘…it’s easy to follow the money. I love that I can follow this from the bank to my invoice and also see the fees. I can choose absorb those fees or pass them and I know what’s happening’.

This testing also informed some UI improvements - the main one was that we needed to bring greater visibility to surcharges and merchant fees. I reworked the UI after several interview to address feedback and A/B tested these in second half our interviews to increased findability.

User interviews allowed refinement of information such as fee placement

Bringing this into product

While I constantly worked our development team as I designed this feature, when it came building the feature we discovered that there were technical constraints than previously uncovered in the initial tech spike. Much of the code base we were dealing with was attached to existing functionality in MYOB Business Light that we were repurposing and there were legacy payment systems with regulatory constraints.

Working with our development and product teams, we negotiated the tradeoffs so could determine our MLP. Click to see full image

Working with with our senior developer, we negotiated tradeoffs to determine what our (MLP) Most Loveable Product would be. We then split work into stages with minor modifications to the UI at each stage allowing a staged rollout.

The full income list flow. In this case, the sole trader has taken has taken a Tap to Pay payment.

Results

The income list was an integral part of the Solo app. Our staged rollout approach not only allowed us to meet our launch deadline but greatly increased income visibility for Sole traders. Along with out other work this meant by the end of the 2025 we had reached our subscriptions goals of 30k users.

Apple store
rating of

4.8

UMUX
score of

4.4/5

Play store
rating of

4.8

2025 EOY subscriptions

30,000

Getting visibility over your cashflow

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