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Solutions · Where you are nowThe practice that runs on Outlook and a spreadsheet.
FigsFlow replaces the spreadsheet tracker, the Outlook reminders and the Word templates that hold a Canadian accounting practice together. Proposals, engagement letters, FINTRAC records, jobs, CRA deadlines and client chasing move into one platform — without a six-month implementation.
Everything you already track by hand, tracked properly — and without you having to build the thing that tracks it.
- Your files
- Stay in SharePoint
- Outlook
- Stays your mailbox
- The tracker
- Stops being the system
- Deadline column typed by handRight until somebody sorts the sheet without selecting every columnManual
- Three versions in circulationOne on the desktop, one in email, one somebody is editing nowv5 · v6 · v7
- Compliance tab last touched in MarchIdentity records kept apart from the client fileStale
- No record of who changed whatChasing lives in a sent-items folder, not on the jobNone
Illustrative. File name and contents are sample data.
Why it stops working
The spreadsheet is not the problem. Being the only record is.
It got the practice this far, and it did that because it was quick to change. The same thing that made it quick is what stops it holding a firm together.
It only works while one person maintains it.
What changes
Work sits on jobs with an owner, a stage and a date, so the week is readable by anyone in the practice without ringing the person who built the sheet.
Readable by the whole team
Chasing lives in your sent items.
What changes
Requests go out from the portal and chase on a schedule. What is outstanding is a screen, rather than something you work out by searching Outlook.
Chased on a schedule
There is no trail when somebody asks.
What changes
Approvals, identity checks and changes are recorded as they happen on one audit trail — not reconstructed from a file name and a memory of who had it last.
Recorded as it happens
On FINTRAC: accounting firms are reporting entities only when carrying out triggering activities — receiving or paying funds, buying or selling securities, real property or business entities, transferring funds, or giving instructions for any of these. FigsFlow evidences and assists your compliance programme and keeps the records. It does not file reports to FINTRAC, and it does not make a practice compliant.
Column by column
Six things the tracker was standing in for.
Every column in that sheet exists because something real had to be remembered. This is where each of them ends up, so nothing is lost in the move.
- The “new client” rows at the bottomOnboarding
Proposal, engagement letter, identity check and first job as one sequence off a single client record.
Open - The Word templates folderEngagement letters
Clause sets your firm has reviewed, produced from the client record and sent for signature.
Open - The status column everyone colours inJobs
A stage and an owner on the work itself, so the colour coding stops being a convention only your team understands.
Open - The deadline column you type by handDeadlines
The filing calendar across the whole client book, rather than dates re-entered each year and sorted at your peril.
Open - The chasing you do from OutlookRequests
Requests sent and chased on a schedule, with what is outstanding visible without opening your sent items.
Open - The compliance tab nobody opensFINTRAC
Identity verification and its evidence held on the client record for the retention period, beside the work it relates to.
Open
Kept by handUntil it is kept for you
What you are not giving up
Nothing you rely on has to be thrown away.
Firms put this move off because it sounds like ripping out the way they work. In practice the tools stay. What changes is which one everybody treats as the truth.
- 01Your documents stay in SharePointFigsFlow points at the folders you already keep. Your files are not copied into a second store.
- 02Your email stays in OutlookThreads link to the client record. The mailbox, the retention policy and the archive stay yours.
- 03Excel stays for the analysisIt is a good tool for working something out. It is a poor one for being the only record of who owes what.
- 04Your way of working comes acrossThe stages you already use become templates, rather than you learning somebody else’s process.
Moving off a tracker is usually the quickest switch there is, because there is no vendor to leave — see how switching works.