About the client
Orche is a Berlin-based fintech start-up founded in 2021 by a former agency operations manager who had spent years paying freelancers, contractors and vendors across three countries. The reality behind that job was spreadsheets, four different banking portals, invoices buried in email threads, and payroll runs that consumed two full days at the end of every month.
The challenge
The founder had the domain insight but no product: a platform where a small or mid-sized business could onboard every provider, track what is outstanding, run payroll, and see one honest number instead of ten conflicting ones. Orche came to Digital Colliers with a Figma prototype and a runway clock ticking.
Three constraints shaped the engagement:
- Money movement means compliance and reconciliation cannot be treated casually. Every ledger entry had to balance.
- The seed round set the deadline: an investor-ready MVP in roughly fourteen weeks.
- The dashboard had to make a scary financial picture feel calm and legible to non-finance users.
What we built
We designed and built a modular web application covering the full payables workflow:
- Provider management for onboarding freelancers, contractors and vendors in one place.
- Invoice ingestion that pulls documents out of email threads and into a structured queue.
- A transaction ledger with a strict Payment, Pending and Paid state machine, so reconciliation holds up to scrutiny.
- A payroll engine that turns the end-of-month marathon into a supervised run.
The hero of the interface is the Total Outstanding widget: one number and one trend line, filterable across one month to one year, with drill-downs only when the user wants them. That calm anchor was a deliberate design decision for people who do not live in finance tools.
How we worked
A compact product team owned the MVP end to end, from UI/UX through architecture and delivery, working against the fixed fourteen-week window. Compliance-sensitive parts of the system, the ledger and payment states, were built first and tested hardest, while the interface went through rapid iterations with non-finance users in mind.
The outcome
The MVP shipped on time. Orche closed its seed round, onboarded its first cohort of SMB clients, and a typical payroll run dropped from around two days to under an hour. The collaboration is ongoing as the platform grows with its customer base.