My journey with Open
I joined Open a year ago and my journey has been all about new challenges & roles. I started out as an individual contributor, which later developed into a ‘Team Lead’ role & then eventually shaped up to that of a ‘Technical Product Manager’. Most traditional financial software companies in India, often record accounting & banking transactions in an offline manner via native applications. This often leads to problems like non-accessibility to data 24×7, device dependency, human errors, data security, mismatch in books data versus bank data, etc. Most business owners either end up spending a large amount of time rectifying these issues themselves or hiring a financial consultant. And these are the exact challenges that I’ve been working on solving for business owners all over, for the past 15 months.The API adventure
I was initially given the opportunity to build an API-based plugin that can be used to easily integrate Open with a third-party accounting software. This way users on Open could easily manage their collections and payouts from a single platform. It was very tricky to design a schema that was both compatible and scalable. Working with supportive and like-minded colleagues helped me a lot at conceptualizing technical solutions for such complex problems. I brainstormed with the product team for hours to come up with a workflow that helps users automate all their accounting. This way, they’d no longer be required to spend hours manually tracking income & expenses and recording them in their accounting software.Leading the way
I was then given the opportunity to take lead as a ‘Technical Product Manager’ for the finance module. My previous ventures had equipped me with the functional knowledge & user expectations that one needs to keep in mind while designing this module. And I could easily approach the leadership team at Open to share my vision for the roadmap ahead. I started out setting up accounting rules and the flow of information in different DB tables – one thing that was both interesting and challenging at the same time. And we eventually built a GST compliant finance module that provides options for collections & payouts directly against invoices and bills.
