Cargo X, a Brazilian logistics tech company, was transitioning from a traditional shipping mindset to a product-oriented organization. Despite its startup nature, many internal workflows were still manual and disconnected — particularly in billing, where lead times were long and operational inefficiencies were driving up costs.

As part of the product design team, I was tasked with identifying where design could make the biggest impact. After shadowing both billing and finance teams for a week, the data revealed that billing had the highest opportunity for optimization — saving around 40 hours per day, compared to 12 for finance, due to recurring bottlenecks in invoice validation and correction cycles.

My goal was to reduce the overall billing lead time by addressing the key friction points in the validation and correction process, which were caused by other team involved in this process. All those other teams were working with different systems and processes, and they all relied on the billing team, because they couldn't access all the data they neeed to do it.

The challenge was: How might we enable non-finance teams to handle validation autonomously — without adding risk or requiring extensive training?

Shadowing & Workflow Mapping
I mapped out the existing billing flow from commercial operations to client invoicing, identifying redundant validations and broken communication loops between teams.

Finding the root Cause: Manual Validation
The main bottleneck came from validating invoice data manually using PDFs or photos. Each check required switching between Cargo X, the KMM system, and government-issued invoice files.

Leveraging Digital Invoice Data (XML)
After consulting the billing team, we discovered that invoices were available in a structured XML format from the government portal — a breakthrough that made automation possible.

Automated Data Comparison Service
Working with engineering, we built a backend service that fetched XML data directly and compared it with Cargo X’s internal records (origin, destination, weight, expiration, etc.). Any mismatch was automatically flagged for correction before it reached the billing team.

Design: Unified Validation Interface
I designed a new interface within Cargo X’s main platform, where operations could validate invoices in a single system instead of three. The new interface streamlined validation by presenting data in a clear, easy-to-understand format — avoiding errors that would have required manual rework.

• Familiar layout based on existing internal tools
• XML viewer that visually mimicked the old PDF format
• Checkboxes for quick validation
• Automatic error highlighting

The redesigned workflow reduced the billing validation time from 2h05 to 1h25 per invoice, cutting the process by 32% and other key outcomes were:

• Reduced dependency on the billing team
• Validation centralized in one system (owned by Cargo X)
• Automatic error detection and highlighting
• System-readable historical data by using XML instead of PDF

We got these results in a single quarter, from discovery, to design, to implementation, to deployment and metrics tracking.

Although the project was successful, we could go further. The idea was to let the clients themselves run the validation of the documents they submit, rather than relying on someone from our team. This would reduce the leadtime to zero and they could focus on other tasks for the company.