1 Introduction
‘My wife doesn’t work.’
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Uncovering and making accountable the informal work practices of domestic invoice management to sensitize researchers and designers to the contingencies of domestic work practices and a wide diversity of domestic ordering systems
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Analyzing the effects of the co-existence of digital and electronic documents and how these impact domestic work practices
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Developing some ‘implications for design’ that support domestic work practices beyond a naive rationalization and automatization paradigm
2 Related Work
2.1 Making domestic work visible
2.2 Accounting research
2.2.1 Business accounting
2.2.2 Household Accounting
2.2.3 Accounting as a mundane practice
3 Methodology
3.1 Sampling and Participants
Name1 | IF | Age | Gender | Household Type | Profession | Average monthly income [€] | Health insurance |
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Sophia | VC | 21 | W | Couple household (two-person) | Student with part time job | 450 | public |
Isabella | VC | 21 | W | Single; household with 6 persons (Family) | Student without part time job | No income | public |
Kim | VC | 24 | W | Single; single-person household | Student and Medical assistance | 450 | public |
Emma | F2F | 24 | W | Single; household with 3-4 persons (community) | Research associate | 4.400 | public |
Mia | VC | 24 | W | Couple household (two-person) | Student without part time job | No income | - |
Oliver | VC | 26 | M | Couple household (two-person) | IT-Product Manager and Financial Advisor | 7.500 | public |
Amelia | VC | 27 | W | Couple household (two-person) | Research assistant | 4.000 | public |
Noah | VC | 28 | M | Single; single-person household | Sales Manager | 3.000 – 4.000 | public |
Evelyn | VC | 31 | W | Couple household (two-person) | Research assistant | 1100 | public |
Olivia | F2F | 34 | W | Married, a two-person household | Research associate | 4.800 | public |
William | F2F | 36 | M | Single; single-person household | Research associate | 4700 | public |
Kathy | F2F | 38 | W | Married; four-person household; two children | Social worker | – | public |
Ava | VC | 55 | W | Married; four-person household; two children | Employer | 450 | public |
James | VC | 57 | M | Married; three-person household; one child | Insurance company worker | >10.000 | private |
Charlotte | VC | 57 | W | Couple household (two-person) | Personal Assistance | 3.500 - 4.000 | public |
Benjamin | VC | 61 | M | Couple household (two-person) | Financial and investment advisor | 7.000 - 9.000 | private |
Henry | F2F | 81 | M | Couple household (two-person) | Pensioner | - | public |
3.2 Methods and Setting
3.3 Data Analysis
4 Findings
4.1 Invoices as a work artifact
4.2 Invoicing as a stateful process
4.3 Filling systems used for invoicing
4.3.1 Buffer
4.3.2 Archives
‘I have a folder on my desktop, and I drag the invoices in there. [...] It’s organized in the same way as a physical folder. [...] But I don’t use cloud storage, everything is on the hard drive. I just use web.de [a German email provider] and it’s not very secure. If I think the server is down, I log off and still have all my invoices on my desktop.’
4.4 Temporal patterns of invoicing work
4.5 When it is time for invoicing work
4.6 Invoice management as a collaborative effort
5 Discussion
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At the methodological level: Our study demonstrates how to overcome the limitations of time-series studies to empirically research situated household work.
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At the level of the subject matter: Our study reveals how people accomplish mundane administrative household chores by making order and structuring the work.
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At the design level: Our study provides insights and requirements for the design of support systems beyond process automation.
5.1 ‘Get a grip’ on domestic work
Topic | Contribution |
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Working times | Time budget surveys implicitly assume that tasks have a clear beginning and end (Hamermesh et al. 2005). Through Following-the-invoice, however, it becomes evident that the beginning and end are not natural given. It is a result from artful competency to create temporal order with the help of buffers, reminders, and sorting orders to manage the distinction between working time and processing time. |
Work placement | Previous domestic studies (Harper and Shatwell 2002; Taylor and Swan 2005; Vyas et al. 2016) emphasize that work placement is a vital resource for coordinating domestic activities. With Following-the-invoice, we gain additional insights about the spatial-temporal nexus of this placement, which aligns with the workflow. For instance, the pre-processing mainly aims to make the work visible, while pre-processing placement aims to make the work invisible so that it does not disturb the home’s aesthetics as a place of leisure and relaxation. |
Work Distribution | Feminist studies show that domestic paperwork is unequally distributed (Daminger 2019; E. F. Emens 2021). Following-the-invoice gives us additional insights about the domestic division of labor in practice regarding responsibilities, organizational issues, and reasons given. |
Interface Work | Business accounting (Deshmukh 2006) and domestic work (Vyas et al. 2016), are commonly perceived as distinct research fields. Following-the-invoice, however, shows that digitalizing the invoicing process affects existing household accounting work in unintended ways. Individuals are required to perform interface work to make the external invoicing processes compatible with the internal ordering systems. |
5.2 Ordering systems used for household accounting
Buffer | Archive | |||
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Physical | Digital | Physical | Digital | |
Goals | Short term goals | Long term goals | ||
Retention time | Input Buffer: hours to days Pre-processing Buffer: hours to weeks Post-processing Buffer: weeks to years | Years to Decades | ||
Location | Kitchen Table, on the Cabinet, Dresser, Desk, etc. | Email Inbox, Service Provider/Retailer Apps | In the Cabinet, Shelf, etc. | Email Inbox, App, Hard Drive |
Ordering principle | Organically, often chronological | Chronologically | Chronologically, Thematic, Numbered/Alphabetical | Chronologically, Thematical, Numbered/Alphabetical |
Search support | No | Full-text search | No | Full-text search |
Articulation & Awareness | High | Email: Medium Apps: Low | Medium-Low | Low |
5.3 Implications for design
Topic | Gained insights | Design issues |
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Workflow support | ||
Tasks | Dealing with invoices does not serve one purpose only, but is part of various activities (such as paying, doing taxes, and handling claims) | • Design should not focus on a single task but should consider several purposes. • Design should focus on making common tasks efficient but also facilitate non-anticipated purposes. |
Processes | Invoices have a life cycle. They are used together with other records in multi-stage workflows. | • Design should allow users to implement at least their simplified workflow, as shown in Fig. 2. |
Channels & Formats | Digitization has led to a multiplication of the channels through which household members receive or retrieve invoices and other documents. The same applies to the data formats. | • Design should recognize the co-existence of multiple channels (mail, email, and increasingly proprietary apps and web portals). • Companies should provide standardized API making their e-invoices accessible. • Design should recognize the co-existence of multiple human-readable data formats (paper-based, HTML/txt, and pdf). • The industry should standardize machine-readable invoice formats, which can be included in human-readable formats (such as QR codes or as meta-tags in HTML/pdf). |
Buffering | Various forms of pre- and post-processing buffers organize administrative work in practice, deal with the fragmentation of the work process, and signal the current work status. | • Design should support buffering, including means for pre- and post-processing buffering. • Design should provide features of both functions of buffers: - Temporal, enabling different work rhythms and signalizing work status. - Spatial, raising awareness and embodying the work in the social space of the household. |
Living documents | Invoices are not immutable pieces of information but living documents edited by household members over time. | • Design should provide means for labeling, marking, annotating, and putting records together. • Typical ways of labeling and marking should be efficient, but non-anticipated cases should also be possible. |
Task Awareness | Some tasks are tied to deadlines that are often overlooked due to a lack of awareness. | • Design should support task and deadline awareness (such as paying a bill, canceling a contract, or making the tax on time) and warn the user actively if needed. |
Archiving support | ||
Archiving | Archiving invoices is a common practice for maintaining the household’s organizational memory. | • Design should support the archiving, including means for filling, sorting, retrieving, and cleaning up. |
Ordering | Invoices and other records are stored by various ordering principles in practice. | • Design should support a set of common ordering principles (such as chaotically, chronologically, thematically, alphabetically), but enable users also to store them based on their own ordering principles. |
Retrieving | There is a tension to avoid investing time in sorting but aim to retrieve records efficiently. | • Design should be aware that people do not want to spend time in filling and sorting but still want to retrieve records in a reasonable time. |
Retrieving records is typically caused by a special task (like tax submission). | • Design should support task-related retrieving of single documents but also document collections that are needed for the task at hand. | |
Cleaning up | Invoices do not have a fixed expiration date, but there is tension to keep records permanently and secure while having a clean and proper archive. | • Design should provide means to ensure the long-term availability of the household’s archives. • Design should provide means to clean up archives, but people fear of throwing away crucial documents accidentally. |
Additional demands | ||
Cooper-ation | Dealing with an invoice is a matter of cooperation and division of work. | • Design should provide means for cooperation, shared document spaces, and informal division of work (such as division by topic, by specialization, by dispatching) |
Hybrid-icity | Dealing with invoices refers to hybrid practices, where analog and digital channels, records, tools, and archives co-exist in parallel. | • Design should acknowledge the fragmented nature of invoices, which can exist in both analog and digital formats, and may also have redundant copies (such as when invoices are printed out or scanned). • Design should facilitate the transition, referencing, and linking between digital and analog artifacts throughout the entire lifecycle of invoices, encompassing their acquisition, buffering, processing, and archiving stages. |