A year ago Joiin’s reports were powerful but plain: great tables, clunky consolidation, and no real layout control. As of September 2025, Joiin ships a print-ready, section-based report builder that turns multi-company financials into polished, presentable packs.
I led the design at a our agency, partnering closely with Joiin’s founder, their marketing lead, development team and my PM to make that shift.
Context
From consultancy to reporting powerhouse
We began with two workshops to understand how Joiin grew from a consultancy MVP into a robust reporting platform with a loyal user base. Users wanted better UX, simpler multi-company/currency handling, and reports they could confidently present—serving accountants, bookkeepers, CFOs, and directors alike.
Data-rich, but clunky
Reconciliation across QuickBooks, Xero, and Excel was hard to manage. The interface felt cluttered, creating custom reports was confusing, and they offered limited editability. Accountants needed control, CFOs needed narrative, and Joiin needed quicker conversions, faster time-to-value, and credible outputs that looked polished in both print and digital.
Many users with many different needs
We worked in two-week sprints with a lean engineering team, so every step had to be incremental and shippable. Report tables were deeply complex: multi-company headers, multi-month comparisons, auto-saved filters… and user habits couldn’t be ignored, which sometimes simply didn't allow for what we thought could be beneficial changes.
On top of that, we designed within Joiin’s existing, hard-coded foundation. A new design system was out of scope; new components had to work with what existed. So we started with refining where we could: color usage, typography, and iconography.
Approach & Strategy
Our main goal was to work closely with the developers, as we were well aware of the intricacies and complexity that lay behind the product. First step, improve the usability reports and their tables; then layer presentation and all the pretty stuff on top.
We kept a “hot-potato” rhythm—quick and dirty proposals, mid-sprint feedback via Slack and Looms and fast iteration. The goal was to converge on a report builder that respected the workflows of long-standing users while producing new and improved presentation-ready reports.
Key Design Decisions
We started at the core. Filters moved into a right-hand side panel to improve clutter and structure, and we kept persistent filters to preserve one of the most common workflows: checking reports daily or weekly without having to edit settings every time. Tables got a deep pass: density modes for compact or comfortable reading, complex column scaffolds for multi-company comparisons and eliminations, dynamic row heights to reduce print cut-offs, and consistent handling for currencies and large numbers.
With that foundation set, we ideated and proposed Build versus Present mode—users looking to present their reports could add a cover, charts, and text blocks while keeping the working table intact; ideally, by simply adding components to the canvas and moving things around to snap and re-arrange to the grid as needed. Users who simply just wanted to keep checking their reports could leave it at that, a simple and elegant at-a-glance table.
Iterations & Experiments
We handed off an MVP of the initial builder and paused while the developers implemented foundational pieces. During that period we explored charting and a color system, we pressure-tested printing in portrait and landscape, tuning spacing and typography; we also explored a more product-led onboarding with approaches to dealing with the dreaded 2FA setup to reduce early friction.
The big turning point arrived when Joiin came back from implementation: the free drag-and-drop canvas worked in spirit but not in practice given technical constraints. So we reframed the builder around a Section/Row model.
This is how it now worked: Sections act like “pages", and inside each Section, Rows use different layouts—full-width, 1/2 or 1/3—with clear content rules on what you could add where (Reports can't be smaller than a full-width row, for example). Sections can have titles, subtitles and an array of settings to customize the look and feel, and each set of rows and components within them were also editable and customizable.
Final Experience
What Joiin has coined as "Beautiful Reporting" lets users easily compose Sections filled with Rows, then add covers, tables, charts, and narrative text with confidence that exports and prints matching what they see on screen. Charts with text, charts with charts, summaries followed by report tables… and will all the granularity users had been asking for.
Filters and settings for each element sit in the side panel, so the canvas stays focused. Build mode provides anchors for editing; Present mode removes menus and borders so it reads like a deck in an infinite space. We refined spacing within components, between components in a row, and between rows so it visually never feels cramped or loose. Page-break guides make print predictable in both portrait and landscape.
Outcomes
Joiin now ships a consolidated report builder that is live as of September 2025. Power users keep familiar table editing; CFOs and owners get presentation-grade outputs. The builder now supports both simple snapshots and complex multi-entity, multi-currency packs, closing the gap with sleeker-looking competitors while preserving the maturity customers rely on. Internally, the team shipped incrementally and the new architecture gives them a scalable path forward.
We expect time-to-first-value to come down, report build time to decrease versus legacy packs, printing and page-fit tickets to drop, and trial→paid conversion to lift with the new Beautiful Reporting.
Learnings & Final Thoughts
Joiin is complex product that's taken a lot of years and effort to build, and we adapted proposals continuously based on what engineering could and couldn't do—as they ultimately are the brains making it all happen. I learned a lot about their data model and constraints, and we iterated together (many, many rounds) to get to something they could ship with confidence. The result may not be the “drag-and-drop, everything snaps” slickness you see elsewhere, but it’s the right tool for them: reliable, print-aware, and respectful of how their users and themselves actually work.
For sure has been my favourite and most engaging project to date, so thank you to the Joiin team and I wish you the best of luck in your future adventures.
