Farin Sadiq

OneFinance

Introduction

A role-based platform for reporting on UK public infrastructure spend, built to replace a desktop-only legacy system.

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Challenge

A UK local authority ran its infrastructure spend reporting on Oracle Primavera P6 — desktop-only, no API, built for schedulers rather than the contractors and project managers actually filing updates. Contractors lost hours each week turning site photos and paperwork into a format the system would accept, with no visibility into where a submission went once it was in. Projects were running 16 to 44 months late and 19 to 32% over budget, and admin work was eating more of that time than the work itself.

Strategy

OneFinance isn’t a marketplace or a generic dashboard — it’s built around an accountability chain: contractors report progress and spend, project managers review and approve, and that record moves up toward the officials who answer for public money. Treating it as two connected workflows rather than one shared interface let each role see only what its job requires, while keeping both flows consistent enough to live in the same product. Six research-led priorities set the scope: unified submission format, easy navigation, simple document management, integrated progress tracking and communication, quick access to project details, and support for multiple file formats.

System

Contractor and project manager flows are mapped separately, then combined on one diagram to show exactly where they connect: a submission becomes an approval, a status update closes the loop back to the contractor. That handoff is what the legacy system hid, so it had to be visible in the product instead of buried in email threads. A shared component library keeps both role-based experiences consistent without collapsing them into one identical interface.

Solution

Contractors work from a single submission flow covering budget, progress, milestones, and documentation, with tabs and a fixed action bar so a long form never feels shapeless. Project managers work from a sector dashboard built around approvals, flagged issues, and status, with contractor details and project tracking placed where usability testing showed people actually looked for them. Both were tested, measured, and revised before either became final.

Outcome

Contractor admin time dropped 60%. Project manager approval rates rose from 59% to 81%, and submission errors fell 68%. Real-time status tracking eliminated the back-and-forth that used to frustrate 73% of contractors. The bigger shift wasn’t speed on its own — it was contractors and project managers finally working from the same record instead of reconciling two different ones.

Testing/ Usability