Keelvar Rate Manager

How do you make an interface for up to 100k results and 300 custom fields easy to use?

Problem

For procurement professionals, rate management is one of the most operationally complex tasks they face. A "rate card" might contain thousands of agreed contract prices — a shipping container from Southampton to Cork, a raw material tied to a demand forecast, a logistics partner rate locked in for the year. Mid-to-large businesses were managing these across fragmented spreadsheets, manual processes, and disconnected systems, often at enormous scale.

Solution

Keelvar already stored agreed rates inside its e-sourcing events. The opportunity was to surface that data and make it easily transferrable into a dedicated, purpose-built product that could become the single source of truth for agreed contracts.

Discovery & The Greenlight Decision

As lead designer on the project, I facilitated the initial customer interviews to assess whether this product was worth building at all. What I found was unambiguous: procurement teams were drowning in fragmented tooling, labour-intensive tracking, and reporting workflows that didn't scale. The need was real. These insights helped greenlight the project as strategically critical.

Design & Direction

I anchored the design around a tabular interface deliberately modelled on Excel — not because it was the easiest solution, but because it was the most familiar mental model for rate managers. The goal was to start where users already were, then go beyond what Excel could do: advanced filtering, custom field support at scale, and search across tens of thousands of rates.

After low-fidelity concept validation with customers, I worked closely with engineers to assess technical feasibility. AG Grid was selected to power the rate table, capable of handling up to 100,000 rates and 300 custom fields without performance degradation. I also contributed to front-end QA, using my technical background to test in-app designs before deployment.

Testing & Iteration

I led think-aloud user testing sessions with customers, internal stakeholders, and non-expert users prior to launch, uncovering critical usability issues before they reached production. Multiple rounds of iteration followed, refining the filtering, creation flow, and navigation based on what I observed.

Outcome

Rate Manager is now used by nearly 50% of Keelvar's customer base, with close to 1.3 Million rates stored in 700 rate cards. It has replaced fragmented spreadsheet workflows and become the centralised source of truth it was designed to be.

A year on, it's also become the data backbone for Keelvar's AI agents, which autonomously negotiate and store rates on behalf of customers — work that built directly on the foundation Rate Manager established.

This work was created at & is property of Keelvar.

UX research - facilitated early customer interviews to determine if the project should be greenlit.

Validated ideas and identified areas for improvement before launch, conducting multiple internal and customer user testing sessions.

UI design and competitor research - established a look and feel for tabular interface.