WorkRippling · Spend & Travel

One trip, all spend

Link bookings and every cost in a Trip-Linked Expense Report

Discipline: Product design · Mobile
Company: Rippling
Product area: Spend & Travel
When: Apr 2023 → 2025 (concept to patterns adopted; Travel GA summer ’25; shared report targeted Q4 ’25)

Spend and Travel trip-linked report overview — Pulling bookings, card transactions, and reimbursements into one place.

Behind the work

Role

Lead Product Designer (Spend) — strategy, IA, object model, flows, visuals, component specs.

With

Travel Product Designer • UX Research • Design Systems.

Project snapshot

Timeline
Apr ’23 → 2025
Object model
Trip-linked report
Research
Tested with users
Systems
New mobile components

Overview

Travel bookings and Spend lived in separate apps, forcing employees to reconstruct a trip across screens. I led the Spend side with Travel to introduce a Trip-Linked Expense Report—one object that binds itinerary items (flights/hotels/cars) with every related cost (corporate card transactions, reimbursements, per diem). We prototyped variants, tested with Navan users, and used the work to seed Rippling’s new mobile component library, which later accelerated the Time Off mobile redesign.

The problem

App silos
Travel vs Spend created context switching and “DIY reconciliation”
Mental model mismatch
Travelers think “one trip = one bucket of costs”
Legacy patterns
Spend mobile used aging components; Travel mobile was greenfield → risk of drift
Market bar
Competitors (e.g., Navan) show consolidated trip spend

FIG. 01Spend versus Travel problem context

Solution highlights

Trip-Linked Expense Report
bi-directional: create/attach from Travel or Spend
Auto-suggested linking
Detect transactions/receipts within trip window
Policy clarity
Inline indicators for receipt/memo requirements; fix in-flow
Cross-suite precedent
Model used to guide Time suite (Timesheets/Time Off/Holidays) and [COPY NEEDS VERIFICATION]