The decision to overhaul the process of creating Clients and Budgets began with thinking of ways to improve the initial on-boarding experience for trial customers. We weren't doing a good enough job making sure people new to Shape reached a critical mass of data in Shape.

As we dug into the problem, it uncovered ways we could improve the process for people building budgets everyday.

Now when you create a new budget you'll see the new Budget Designer.

Before

All the information to add a Budget lived in one big form, that just kept going...and going...

We liked some aspects of how the old Budget Designer worked, especially the Budget Summary in the right hand sidebar. But our VP of Engineering, Dominic Albano, thought we could do better.

The New Budget Designer

Now Analysts are brought to the new Budget Designer. A cleaner experience with dedicated areas for each of the important settings that accompany new Budgets.

We determined it took too many clicks to enable our most powerful features like AutoPilot, RollOver and SmartSync. The 'Automation' portion of the new Budget Designer makes it easier.

Introducing: Create Similar Budget

After creating a Budget there is a new option, 'Create Similar Budget'

When you select that option, you'll be sent back to the beginning of the Budget creation process but Alert and Automation settings will be saved and applied to the new Budget.

No more duplicating efforts when creating a bunch of Budgets for a Client with the same settings.

We hope this helps your day-to-day.

As always reach out with any ideas you have to make Shape better at feedback@shape.io.