← workcase № 04 · 2023
Buk — recovering medical leave costs without a single spreadsheet.
role
Senior Product Designer
team
Buk · sole designer on this project
platforms
Web
timeline
3 months · 2023
01 · context
Buk is an HR platform used across Latin America, with a growing base of public-sector clients in Chile. For those clients, recovering the cost of an employee's paid medical leave from the health system was handled entirely outside the product — HR teams tracked every case in spreadsheets and chased approvals and payments over email. Nothing was connected: no shared view of a case's status, no record of what had been paid, no visibility for the employee who'd requested the leave in the first place.
02 · problem
Three things slowed every case down.
i.
Everything lived in spreadsheets
Every license and its recovery status was tracked by hand in Excel — no single source of truth, no audit trail.
ii.
Approvals happened over email
Requests, follow-ups and payment confirmations were scattered across email threads — easy to lose, impossible to search.
iii.
No visibility for anyone
HR couldn't see a case's status at a glance, and employees had no way to check on a request they'd already made.
03 · approach
Bring the whole cycle — request, approval, tracking, payment — into one module inside Buk.
01
Map the flow
Walked through how public-sector HR teams actually registered and tracked a license end to end, from the employee's file to the final reimbursement.
02
Design two entries
Built a self-service flow for employees to request a license from their own profile, and an administrative flow for HR to register, review and manage cases directly.
03
Design the record
Gave every license a single detail view — dates, recovery amount, linked events and payments — so status was visible at a glance instead of buried in a spreadsheet.
04
Design payments
Added a dedicated payments module, with support for registering a payment individually or in bulk via template upload — matching how HR actually reconciled recoveries.
"The goal wasn't a prettier spreadsheet — it was making sure nobody had to keep one."
— design principle № 1
04 · solution
05 · results
A module that replaced the spreadsheet — not just a prettier one.
3 mo
From mapping the flow to delivery
2023
2
Flows in one module — request and admin review
self-service + HR
1
Record per license — dates, amount, events, payments
replacing the spreadsheet
2
Ways to register a payment
individually, or in bulk via template
06 · what i learned
- 01Some of the most valuable design work isn't on a screen — it's untangling a process that used to live in someone's inbox.
- 02Designing two personas — employee and HR admin — around one shared record kept both flows honest about what the other could see.
- 03A payments module only works if it matches how finance actually reconciles: individual entries and bulk templates both had to exist.