Nobody at Crane & Partners Keeps a Deadline List Any More

Crane & Partners have been filing from their office. This is an ordinary Tuesday, hour by hour, now that the whole practice runs on FigsFlow.

There is a card index in our loft. It was in genuine use until the mid-90s, and it contains, on stiff buff cards in at least four different hands, the year ends of clients who have been dead for thirty years. We keep it because it is the honest ancestor of everything that came after it – a spreadsheet, then a better spreadsheet, then a spreadsheet with 14 tabs that only one person in the building fully understood.

We do not keep any of them now. FigsFlow replaced them all.

08.12: The Deadline Radar That Nobody Maintains

Our senior manager is in before the kettle has finished, which is not new. What is new is that she opens FigsFlow's practice dashboard and that is the whole of it. One screen, where there used to be four.

It shows 31 obligations landing inside the next fortnight, three jobs sitting in partner review longer than they should be, and one client held at due diligence. The obligations are not tasks anybody created. FigsFlow holds recurring UK obligations as objects on each client record and computes them from that client's own data. The 31 March year ends, the VAT stagger 1 quarters ending in September, the RTI cycles, the confirmation statement anniversaries pulled from Companies House. Change a client's accounting reference date on the record and the whole schedule moves by itself.

That is the distinction that took us a while to appreciate. A calendar reminder is something a person put there. A FigsFlow obligation is something the client's own facts produced.

08.40: Bank Statements Photographed at 21.47, Filed By the System

A set of August statements arrives from a CIS contractor client, taken on a phone. He is on site from 7 in the morning and his paperwork lives in his van. We used to telephone him twice a month.

What changed is FigsFlow's forms and requests module, which raises a request against a specific job and tracks it from sent to reviewed, combined with the client app that lets him photograph a document straight into that request. The statements land on the correct job on the correct client record, and his monthly CIS return stops being a scramble on the 17th.

The chasing is not us either. FigsFlow chases against the deadline on the record, on a schedule, so the second reminder goes out whether or not anyone here remembered to send it. His records used to reach us around the 19th. They reach us around the 8th.

09.06: Enquiry to Priced Proposal in Nine Minutes

A new limited company comes in through the website, incorporated six weeks ago, wanting accounts, VAT and a small payroll.

It lands in FigsFlow's CRM as a record rather than an email, with its source captured. The company number goes in, the Companies House integration fills the rest, and the registered office, incorporation date, two directors, one PSC and accounting reference date populate themselves.

The fee comes from FigsFlow's pricing engine running on rules we configured: entity type, turnover band, and the complexity factors that matter to us, so that a construction client with two months of unreconciled bank feeds does not price the same as a consultancy with 15 transactions a month. The proposal is generated from the services already scoped on the record. It goes out at 09.15.

Nine minutes, and the only thinking in it was thinking that should be there.

What matters more is what FigsFlow stops happening next. Nobody retypes the company number into an engagement letter, because the letter is assembled clause by clause from the accepted services. Nobody creates a second record when the prospect becomes a client, because the prospect becomes the client in place. Nobody adds the year end to a list. On signature, FigsFlow creates the jobs from our workflow templates, loads the statutory deadlines and raises the invoice from the price snapshot, in that order, without anyone touching a keyboard.

10.00: The Number This Practice Went a Century Without

Twenty minutes, two directors, coffee, and FigsFlow's reporting module open on recovery by service line.

Ours averages 84%. It averaged 76% before FigsFlow's timesheets made it visible, and the average was concealing the shape. Bookkeeping for clients with disorganised records was recovering 54%, while tax and accounts work sat well above the line. Something close to a fifth of the book was being carried by the rest of it.

We could not see this before, and the reason is mechanical rather than cultural. Time used to be recorded against broad codes. FigsFlow posts time against the job that was scoped and sold, so recovery can be read per client, per service line and per job against the fee that was actually agreed.

Nineteen clients were repriced at their renewal dates. Eighteen stayed. One left, and that one was right to leave. Our retention is still 99%, and the reason we could reprice without damaging it is that FigsFlow gave us specifics. Not "costs have gone up." Instead, here is the scope on the engagement, here is the recorded time, here is the gap.

11.20: The Brown Envelope, and the Request That Still Closes

Picture a building society passbook, a P60 and a handwritten note, posted second class.

The client is in her 80s, has been with this firm since the Callaghan government, and has no intention of using a portal. She will not be using one. Our office secretary scans the contents into the open FigsFlow request on her record, and the request closes exactly as it would if the client had uploaded them herself. The job moves on. The audit trail records who filed what and when.

We mention this because practice software is usually sold on the assumption that every client is ready to be digitised, and roughly a third of ours are not. About two-thirds took to the FigsFlow client portal readily. Around 30 people needed a telephone call from someone they knew. A handful will always prefer the post.

What made that survivable is that FigsFlow tracks the request, not the channel. A document that arrives by Royal Mail satisfies the same obligation as one that arrives through the portal, and the practice's view of what is outstanding stays true either way.

12.05: A 28% Shareholder, And the Decision FigsFlow Does Not Make

One of our tax managers escalates a file to the MLRO.

A care home group, three homes across two trading companies, has taken on a new shareholder holding 28% through a company registered outside the UK. Because FigsFlow carries group structure, directors and PSCs on a single client record, the ownership change is visible against the whole group rather than buried in one entity's file.

FigsFlow then applies enhanced due diligence scope from coded rules rather than from whoever happens to remember that a 25% threshold matters. It scores the risk deterministically, opens the EDD workflow, routes the file to our MLRO and writes every step to an immutable audit trail.

It does not make the decision, and it does not claim to. Our MLRO makes the call and signs it, exactly as before, and our obligations under MLR 2017 remain entirely ours. FigsFlow's own documentation says as much, which is one of the reasons we trusted the rest of it.

What did change is retrieval. The last time we were asked to produce the reasoning behind risk ratings on named files, it took the better part of two days across three people and four locations. In FigsFlow it takes as long as it takes to open the client, because the rating, the rule that produced it, the date and the approver all sit on the record together.

14.00: 214 Directors, Tracked Against An Obligation With No Deadline of its Own

One of our associates works through identity verifications inside FigsFlow's Companies House module.

We are tracking 214 directors and people with significant control across our client companies, with each one's verification status held against that company's confirmation statement date as the transition works through. This is precisely the sort of obligation that goes missing in a general practice, because it is not a filing with its own deadline and it does not announce itself. It is a status that has to be true by a date, on a register, for a company that may not otherwise be in front of you for another eleven months.

On a list, 30 of those would be late by Christmas. In FigsFlow, they are a field on the company they belong to, visible from the record and surfaced by the same deadline radar that carries the year ends.

15.10: 61 Clients, Four Cumulative Quarters, One Deadline Met

MTD for Income Tax brought 61 of our clients into scope from April, landlords and sole traders over the £50,000 threshold, with a considerably larger group following at £30,000. Each is four cumulative quarterly updates plus a final declaration, on top of everything the practice already did.

FigsFlow models this properly rather than as four repeated tasks. The quarters are first-class obligations with the correct period ends, including the calendar quarter election for the clients who took it, and the cumulative nature of the updates is built in, so a correction rolls forward rather than reopening anything. Record chasing starts three weeks out.

At the 7 August deadline, all 61 were in. Four needed chasing, and FigsFlow did the chasing in July, before anyone here had to think about it.

To be clear, FigsFlow did not make any submissions to HMRC. It is not recognised for MTD filings and it does not claim to be. What it did was ensure 61 sets of records existed, reconciled and were reviewed in time for our software to file them, which is the part that actually costs a practice its August.

17.45: An Invoice That is Deliberately Boring

The fee comes from the price snapshot FigsFlow froze on the engagement letter at the moment the client accepted it.

That client asked for extra work in June, a capital gains computation on a property disposal. Because FigsFlow bills against the frozen scope rather than against a general sense of the annual fee, the additional work surfaced as a variation to be agreed and signed, rather than as three hours quietly absorbed.

Debtor days across the practice have come down from 54 to 39. Write-offs are roughly a third of what they were. Neither is a feature anybody demonstrated to us in a sales call. Both are consequences of one structural thing FigsFlow does – it holds the scope, the work and the fee as the same record, so they cannot drift apart.

18.02: 40 Years of Judgement, Written Into a Workflow Template

Our longest-serving consultant, who has been coming to this building for longer than most of the current staff have been alive, looks at a FigsFlow workflow template.

It is the one for limited company accounts, and it has his fingerprints all over it. The order he checks things in, the query he always raises about directors’ loan accounts before anything else, the point at which he insists somebody telephones the client rather than emailing. Someone sat with him and built it in FigsFlow as a template, with steps, owners and review points. Now every job of that type in the firm is generated from it, including the ones worked by people who will never have shared an office with him.

What An Ordinary Tuesday Looks Like Now

The work is visible. The process exists outside of two people's memories. The client experience did not change for anyone who did not want it to.

The lady with the brown envelope has noticed nothing at all. The contractor has noticed that we stopped ringing him. The care home group's finance manager has noticed that she can see all five entities in one place on a Monday morning, which she mentioned, unprompted, as the reason she stopped keeping her own spreadsheet.

Traditional values, as it turns out, survive modern tools rather better than we expected.