Meshed360.
Smarter operations for South African businesses, with Xero built in.
- Role
- Design Lead · Senior PD
- Platform
- Web · SaaS
- Integration
- Xero
- Scope
- Full platform + design system
About
Business-management SaaS for SA SMEs, wholesalers, and small manufacturers — built to run on Xero.
Meshed360 gives South African SMEs the full operational stack — sales, purchases, invoicing, receiving, assemblies, asset tracking, and configurable reporting — without the weight of a full ERP. By keeping operational and financial data continuously in sync with Xero, it closes the gap between accounting and day-to-day operations.
I owned the end-to-end design across a very wide surface — customers, orders, invoicing, suppliers, purchase orders, receiving, products, assemblies, approvals, roles and permissions, assets, reporting, and the Xero integration layer.
Operational depth without ERP weight — the middle ground most SMEs actually live in.
Outcomes · Post-launch
Measured across onboarded businesses in the first months after launch.
76%
SME onboarding rate
Completed setup within their first week.
64%
Active weekly usage
Teams using Meshed360 three-plus times a week.
36%
Faster reconciliation
Driven by the live Xero integration.
29%
Faster processing
1-click
Audit-ready reporting
End-to-end
Stock traceability
Real-time
Xero sync
Secondary metrics — processing speed, compliance, traceability, and sync against the legacy tool-sprawl workflow.
Phase one · The problem
Finance here, operations there.
The gap
- Stock in spreadsheets
- Invoices in email threads
- Xero can't go deep on ops
- A full ERP is overkill
South African SMEs, wholesalers, and small manufacturers run their finances in one place and their operations in another. Stock lives in spreadsheets, invoices in email, supplier records on a desktop — and the accountant only sees the picture once a month: late, incomplete, and full of reconciliation pain.
Xero solves the accounting layer well, but doesn't go deep on operations — receiving, assemblies, approvals, asset tracking, and reporting all sit outside it. The brief: close that gap. Financial and operational depth in one system, with Xero as the always-on backbone.
Process
Competitor analysis, stakeholder interviews, and behavioural research with owners, ops managers, and controllers.
- 01
Discovery
- 02
Research
- 03
Strategy
- 04
Ideate
- 05
Prototype
- 06
Validate
- 07
Delivery
Phase two · The people
Owner, ops, and finance.
Three roles run an SME — the owner watching cash flow, the ops manager moving stock, and the controller closing the books. Meshed360 had to serve all three in one product.
Thabo
SME owner
Runs a growing retail business with a small in-house workshop. Wants to manage sales, stock, supplier invoices, and VAT without leaning on an accountant for day-to-day calls.
What he needs
Simple tools, fewer errors, and clear cash-flow visibility so he can scale with confidence.
Zanele
Operations manager
Oversees daily operations from goods receiving through PO approvals — running a busy warehouse through peak periods.
What she needs
Accurate inventory, fast approvals, team accountability, and confidence the business stays compliant.
Pieter
Financial controller
Manages finances, asset tracking, and reporting for a mid-sized manufacturer.
What he needs
Precise data, strong Xero integration, and flexible reporting — less month-end delay, better forecasting.
Phase three · How I solved it
Four gaps, four systems.
- 01
Problem
Disconnected financial & operational data
SMEs manage stock, invoicing, and finances in separate tools or by hand — gaps, lag, and inconsistent records between the ops team and the accountant.
Solution
A unified ecosystem
Meshed360 connects stock, billing, supplier invoices, and asset records directly to Xero, so financial and operational data stay in sync across teams in real time.
- 02
Problem
Manual billing & approval bottlenecks
Businesses rely on email, spreadsheets, and paper trails to invoice and approve purchase orders — slow turnarounds and avoidable errors.
Solution
Automated billing + approvals
Invoicing, sales orders, and POs automated, with custom approval workflows matched to each business's governance. Faster turnarounds, clearer accountability.
- 03
Problem
Inaccurate stock management
Wholesalers and manufacturers hit stock discrepancies from fragmented data, missed receiving steps, and no visibility into assemblies.
Solution
End-to-end inventory
Structured receiving, supplier invoice capture, stock adjustments, and full assemblies/disassemblies support — accurate from PO through to assembled product, traceable at every step.
- 04
Problem
Limited reporting & compliance
SMEs lack the tools to generate the reports they actually need — hard to track performance, manage VAT, or meet compliance with confidence.
Solution
Custom reporting & dashboards
Real-time dashboards for sales, stock, and cash flow, plus configurable templates across every feature. Audit-ready, SARS-aligned reports in a single click.
Phase four · Key decisions
Three decisions that defined it.
Xero as the backbone, not a feature
Most products treat Xero as a bolt-on. I designed Meshed360 the other way round — every relevant action writes to Xero in real time, and Xero data surfaces contextually wherever it adds clarity. The reconciliation gap that defines SME accounting disappears; this one decision drove the 36% reconciliation-speed gain.
A configurable approval engine, not hard-coded workflows
Approvals were the single most-cited pain point in research. Rather than a fixed flow, I designed an engine where businesses define their own requesters, approvers, and conditions per workflow — including auto-creating and auto-authorising in Xero on final approval. Every business's governance, no custom builds.
Assemblies & disassemblies as first-class objects
Accounting tools that serve small manufacturers usually duck assemblies or hide them behind a stock-adjustment workaround. I made them top-level production flows — structured component lists, automatic inventory updates, full traceability from raw stock to finished product. That's what makes Meshed360 viable for light manufacturing, not just retail and wholesale.
Phase five · How I used AI
AI as a design accelerant.
AI ran through how I worked — not as a feature inside Meshed360, but as a design accelerant. The most material use was AI-assisted prototyping: fully interactive, high-fidelity prototypes built in a fraction of the usual time.
That changed the pace of stakeholder alignment. I could put a working interaction in front of a stakeholder the same day a question was raised, validate it, and iterate against real feedback instead of static screens. Across a product with this much surface area, that speed compounded into a sharper IA, fewer late-stage reworks, and stronger alignment.
A stakeholder question raised in the morning could be answered with a working interaction by the end of the day — validated against real feedback, not static screens.
Phase six · System & flows
A system to hold it together.
Foundations
- Typography
- Palette
- Components
- Templates
I built Meshed360's design system on atomic principles — atoms through pages — to keep a very wide product visually and behaviourally consistent. It gave the team a flexible foundation for rapid iteration across areas as different as the sales dashboard, the approvals engine, the assemblies flow, and the reporting templates — without the UI fragmenting at the seams.
- Typography — Inter, Bold through Light.
- Palette — Ethereal Blue #5D8FFC, Beacon Blue #0A0445, Moon Indigo #333752, White.
- Components — buttons, fields, cards, table rows, approval steps, status badges.
- Templates — dashboard, customers list, purchase-order detail, reporting view, assemblies builder.
Phase seven · Selected screens
Selected screens.
The core flows at a glance. Detailed UI breakdowns live on Behance.
Business dashboard — sales trends, cash flow, stock, and outstanding invoices in one layout. Clarity without digging through reports.
Reflections
Meshed360 was an exercise in the SaaS-to-ERP middle ground — enough operational depth to run a real business, without the weight of a system nobody wants to implement. The decisions that carried it were architectural: Xero as the backbone, a configurable approvals engine instead of hard-coded flows, and assemblies as first-class objects. Each one turned a category of pain into a property of the system.
Designing across owner, ops, and finance in a single product is where the atomic design system earned its keep — and where AI-assisted prototyping paid off most, keeping a very wide surface coherent while moving fast enough to validate decisions against real stakeholder feedback.
Design Xero in as the backbone, not a bolt-on, and the reconciliation gap that defines SME accounting simply disappears.
— What I learned
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