About Circula

Building Europe's #1 Employee Finance App!

Circula is a fintech startup offering an innovative and paperless solution to complicated and tedious travel expense management. The company merges expense management, payments and employee benefits creating the first truly employee-centric SaaS product in Europe.

The Brief

In Circula, employees create “trips” to claim expenses. Users must assign a project both to the trip and again to each expense, even though most trip expenses belong to the same project, creating redundant work. This project proposed solutions to remove that repetition while keeping the option to change the project per expense when needed, including a quick-to-implement fix and a longer-term north star approach.

My Approach

Based on two key insights, I made two assumptions (later on validated) that guided the design:

First, business trips are typically tied to a specific client/project, so the project attribution will rarely need to change during the trip. However, since employees may still handle other work or combine multiple client visits, the ability to switch the project must remain available.

Second, employees usually work on only a handful of projects at once (often 3–5, very rarely more than 10). That means we can replace a cumbersome dropdown with a more visual, faster selection pattern, making project assignment and switching smoother when submitting expenses.

Quick Win

• Keep the previously selected Project as the default in the dropdown. For first-time users, show a pop-up confirmation overlay (“Use this as default?”) with a "Don’t show again" checkbox. This speeds up the flow and helps prevent attribution errors.
  
  

• When creating a trip, the user selects the project(s). That selection becomes the default for all expenses in the trip, but users can still change the project on any individual expense if needed.