A meeting that arrives already prepared
FigsFlow is meetings and scheduling inside the client record — the client books real availability from your Outlook calendar, the invitation carries a Teams link and an agenda built from what is actually open on their file, and what you agree in the room becomes tasks on the job rather than a note in somebody's notebook.
Partner or principal, start with what a booking link actually controls in the tour below. Practice manager, go straight to why the eight-email thread happens.
- WhenThu 18 Sep · 10:00–10:45
- Booked byThe client · from your real availability
- WhereTeams link · on the invitation
- Agenda2 open jobs · 1 records request outstanding
- Attached toThe client record · not just a calendar
nobody sent a single “does Thursday work for you?” email
One booking link, and the five things it decides
A meeting type is not a calendar link somebody pasted into an email signature. It is who can be booked, for how long, with what notice, against real availability — plus the agenda the meeting arrives with and what happens to the outcome afterwards. Move through the tabs to look around.
Every figure on this screen is illustrative sample data from a fictional practice. This is a read-only prototype.
A meeting type is set once by the practice. A preparer picks one; they do not invent the rules.
| Type | Length | Bookable by | Notice | Buffer | Booked 90d |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery call — new enquiry | 20 min | Anyone with the link | 4 hours | 10 min after | 68 |
| Onboarding call | 45 min | Named client only | 1 working day | 15 min after | 31 |
| Year-end planning meeting | 45 min | Named client only | 3 working days | 15 min after | 54 |
| Self Assessment review | 30 min | Named client only | 2 working days | 10 min after | 142 |
| Records chase call | 15 min | Named client only | 2 hours | None | 47 |
| Internal — review clinic | 30 min | Practice only | 1 hour | None | 96 |
Length, notice and buffer belong to the type — which is why a 45-minute planning meeting never lands with four minutes' warning.
The client opens a link and picks a slot. What they see is your genuine free time — existing Outlook appointments, leave and the buffers above are already removed.
No account to create · works in a phone browser · reschedule and cancel are self-serve, and both write back to the record
Because the booking sits on the client record, the invitation can carry what is actually open on that client — assembled when the meeting is booked, not typed by whoever remembers.
- 2 open jobs — statutory accounts (at manager review), VAT return Q3 (not started)
- 1 records request outstanding — bank statements to July, chased twice
- Next deadline — accounts to Companies House, 30 September
- 1 document awaiting signature — scope change addendum, sent 9 days ago
- Last meeting — 14 May, three actions agreed, all closed
The partner reads this in the two minutes before the call instead of asking someone to “pull the file”.
The meeting ends. Actions are recorded against the client, and the ones that are work become tasks on a job — which is the difference between a note and a commitment.
| # | Agreed | Owner | Became | Due |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Client to send remaining bank statements | Client | Records request | 25 Sep |
| 02 | Review dividend position before year end | Preparer | Task on the accounts job | 26 Sep |
| 03 | Partner to confirm capital allowances treatment | Signer | Task on the accounts job | 29 Sep |
| 04 | Quote for management accounts | Owner | Deal on the pipeline | — |
| 05 | Book follow-up after filing | Owner | Meeting · scheduled | 12 Oct |
5 actions · 3 became tasks · 1 became a request · 1 became a deal — none of them stayed a note
A meeting type points at a role, not a person — so cover works without editing the link, and a new enquiry never waits for one partner's diary.
| Meeting type | Resolves to | If unavailable |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery call | Pooled — anyone in the new-business rota | Next person with availability |
| Onboarding call | The client's assigned manager | Falls back to the practice default |
| Year-end planning | The client's partner | Named deputy on the client record |
| Self Assessment review | The preparer on the job | Manager, then unassigned pool |
Same precedence the rest of the platform uses: client default → group default → practice default → pool.
This is the read-only tour. Creating a meeting type, connecting a calendar, taking a real booking and recording an outcome all happen in the live product — we do those against your own diary on the call.
Real availability, not a guess
Slots come from your Outlook calendar with notice and buffers applied, so a bookable slot is genuinely bookable.
An agenda from the record
Open jobs, outstanding requests and the next deadline, assembled at booking rather than typed.
Outcomes become work
What you agreed turns into tasks, requests and deals on the same record, with owners and dates.
Roles, not diaries
The link points at a role with a named fallback, so August does not close your new-business calendar.
Booking the meeting is easy. Everything either side of it is where the time goes.
A client emails asking for twenty minutes about their year end. It takes six replies over four days to find a slot, because the partner's real availability lives in Outlook and the person answering the email cannot see it.
The meeting happens. Four things are agreed. Two of them get typed into a notebook, one goes into an email to a colleague, and one is remembered by nobody. Three weeks later the client asks what was decided about the dividend, and the honest answer is that somebody would have to reconstruct it from memory.
The scheduling back-and-forth is the visible cost, and it is the smaller one. The expensive part is that the meeting is not attached to anything — so it arrives without context, and it leaves without producing work. A calendar entry records that forty-five minutes were spent. It does not record what they were spent on, or what the practice now owes the client.
Every seam is a place the practice loses the ability to answer one question: what did we agree with this client, when, and did we do it?
A meeting is a step in the relationship, not an entry in a diary
Scheduling is the part of this that every tool does. What makes it worth having inside a practice system is the two edges: what the meeting knows when it starts, and what it produces when it ends. Both of those need the client record to already be there.
- 01Someone wants to talk
A website enquiry, a client question, or a deadline the practice wants to get ahead of. The contact and the deal already exist.
CRM and pipeline - 02You are hereIt gets booked
Against real availability, into the right person's diary, with a Teams link and a confirmation the client did not have to chase.
- 03And hereIt arrives prepared
Open jobs, outstanding requests and the next deadline travel with the invitation, so nobody spends the first ten minutes catching up.
- 04The outcome becomes work
Agreed actions turn into tasks on a job, requests to the client, or a deal on the pipeline — with owners and dates.
Jobs and workflow - 05It stays on the record
Who met, when, what was agreed and whether it was done — readable by whoever picks the client up next year.
Audit trail
What feeds a meeting
- Your Outlook calendar — genuine free time, with notice and buffers applied before a slot is offered
- The client record — who they are, who owns them, and who should be in the room
- Open jobs and requests — which is what the agenda is assembled from
- Your deadline data — so a year-end conversation knows the year end
What a meeting feeds
- Jobs and tasks — agreed actions with an owner and a date, not a bullet in a note
- Client requests — the things the client left owing you, chased on a schedule
- The pipeline — where the conversation turned into additional work
- The client record — a history someone can read cold, months later
Four things that stop being somebody's job
A bookable slot that is genuinely bookable
Availability is read from the Outlook calendar the person already keeps — not a second calendar they have to maintain. Existing appointments, leave and the meeting type's own buffers are removed before a slot is ever offered.
That is the whole reason double-booking stops. There is no window where the client sees a slot the diary has already filled, because there is no second copy of the diary to fall out of step. And because notice is set on the type, a forty-five minute planning meeting cannot land with four minutes' warning.
- SourceOutlook calendar, live
- RemovedExisting appointments · leave · buffers
- NoticePer meeting type, in hours or working days
- Working hoursPer person, per day
A slot shown to a client is a slot the diary has already agreed to
Nobody spends the first ten minutes catching up
Because the booking is raised against a client rather than an email address, the meeting can carry what is open on that client: jobs in flight, records still outstanding, the next statutory deadline, anything awaiting signature, and what was agreed last time.
This is the part that changes how the meeting feels to the client. They are not asked questions the practice could have answered from its own system, and the partner is not reconstructing the file in the two minutes beforehand.
- Open jobs2 · with current stage
- Outstanding1 records request · chased twice
- Next deadlineCompanies House · 30 September
- Awaiting signature1 · sent 9 days ago
- Last meeting14 May · 3 actions, all closed
Assembled when the meeting is booked, not typed by whoever remembers
What you agreed either becomes work or it does not exist
A meeting note is a record that something was said. A task is a commitment with an owner and a date. The gap between those two is where most of what gets agreed in a client meeting quietly disappears.
Recording an outcome writes to the same objects the rest of the practice already runs on — a task on a job, a request to the client, a deal on the pipeline, or a follow-up meeting. Nothing is left as a bullet that depends on somebody re-reading it.
- 01 · Bank statementsRecords requestClient
- 02 · Dividend positionTask on the accounts jobPreparer
- 03 · Capital allowancesTask on the accounts jobSigner
- 04 · Management accountsDeal on the pipelineOwner
Meeting status: Closed, 4 actions raised — not “held”.
The no-show that costs you a slot in January
Reminders run from the meeting type rather than from whoever set it up, so the cadence is the same for every client and it happens whether or not the owner is at their desk. The client can reschedule or cancel themselves, from the same link.
A rescheduled meeting moves on the record, not just in a diary — so the job it was gating knows, and a cancellation with a stated reason is a recorded event rather than a silence somebody notices a week later.
- On bookingConfirmation with the Teams link
- 2 days beforeReminder, with the agenda attached
- Morning ofReminder, with anything still outstanding
- Client reschedulesSelf-serve · writes back to the record
- Client cancelsReason recorded · owner notified
The cadence belongs to the meeting type, not to a person's habit
Everyone can book a slot. Almost nobody attaches it to the work.
Standalone scheduling tools are good, cheap and genuinely better than we need to be at the booking step itself. The difference shows up in three places: whether the meeting knows anything about the client when it starts, whether the outcome becomes work when it ends, and whether the whole thing is visible to somebody who was not in the room. Judge scheduling for a practice on those three, not on how pretty the booking page is.
Your diary is the constraint on the whole practice. The win is not looking professional — it is never losing an evening to a booking thread, and never double-booking yourself in January.
The first size where the person answering the email cannot see the partner's diary. That is the whole problem, and it is one link away from being solved.
New enquiries start waiting on one partner's availability, which quietly costs you work. Pooled booking is the fix, and it only works if the pool is a role rather than a list of names.
Several offices, several booking habits, and no consistent record of what was agreed with whom. At this size the meeting history matters more than the booking page.
Email back-and-forth
What most practices still do
Gap: everythingFree, and nobody has to learn anything. It costs four days of elapsed time per meeting, produces no record beyond a thread, and fails completely the moment the person with the diary is unavailable.
A standalone booking tool
Calendly, Microsoft Bookings and the rest
Gap: the client, and the outcomeGenuinely good at the booking step, and cheaper than us for that alone. But it books against a calendar, not a client — so the meeting arrives knowing nothing, and what you agree in it has nowhere to go.
A practice suite with a calendar view
Where the jobs already live
Gap: the client-facing bookingGood at showing your team's week. The usual limit is that the client cannot book into it — scheduling is still something the practice does to its own diary, so the email thread survives untouched.
FigsFlow
Built by accountants — the meeting, and what it is for
Gap: nil on these threeReal Outlook availability with per-type notice and buffers. An agenda assembled from open jobs and requests. Outcomes that become tasks, requests and deals on the same record, readable by whoever picks the client up next.
| The test | Email thread | Standalone booking tool | Practice suite | FigsFlow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Client books real availability | No | Yes | Usually not | Yes, from Outlook |
| Meeting arrives with context | No | No | Partly | From the client record |
| Outcome becomes work | No | No | Sometimes | Tasks, requests, deals |
| Readable by someone else later | No | Booking only | Partly | On the client record |
And where we are narrower, on purpose. This is scheduling for meetings that belong to a client relationship. There is no public event or webinar booking, no ticketing, and no paid bookings — if you want to sell seats at a seminar, use something built for that. There is no automatic transcription or AI note-taking in this release; an outcome is recorded by a person. And the booking page carries your practice name and colours, but it is not a freely designable landing page.
The first meeting type a practice sets up is different every time
Scheduling gets switched on at the point where somebody other than the meeting's owner has to answer “when are you free?”. Which meeting type to build first depends on where that question is costing you most — and getting that wrong is why booking links end up unused in an email signature.
Same choice as the comparison above — pick once, both sections follow
A booking link never replaces judgement about who should be in the room. A meeting created from a type can still be reassigned, lengthened, or moved to a different person before it happens. The type is the default, not a lock — practices that make it rigid end up with partners booking around the system, which is worse than an edited meeting.
Short list, honestly labelled
Scheduling touches two things outside FigsFlow: the calendar your practice already keeps, and the way the client is contacted. Everything else on this page is what is not connected — because finding that out in month two is worse than reading it now.
Live today
ShippingMicrosoft 365
Availability is read from the Outlook calendar your people already keep, the booking writes the appointment back into it, and the invitation carries a Teams link. Sign-in is the identity your practice already administers, so there is no separate scheduling login to provision or revoke.
The client portal
Clients book, reschedule and cancel from a link — no account to create, no password to reset, and it works in a phone browser. The same place they upload documents and answer requests is the place they book, so there is one thing to explain rather than three.
The rest of the record
A meeting is raised against a client, so the agenda can read open jobs, outstanding requests and the next deadline — and the outcome can write tasks, requests and deals back to the same objects rather than to a notes field.
Export
Every meeting and every outcome exports in full — for a partner reviewing what was agreed across a portfolio, or for anything you want to build in a spreadsheet. There is no report builder here, so the export is the answer to that, and it is deliberate.
Not yet
And we would rather say soGoogle Calendar
Availability is read from Microsoft 365 only. If your practice runs on Google Workspace, scheduling will not work for you in this release, and we would rather you knew that before a demo than during one.
Transcription and AI notes
No recording, no transcript and no automatic summary. An outcome is recorded by a person after the meeting. The trail says what someone decided, not what a model inferred.
Paid bookings and deposits
A meeting cannot take a payment or hold a deposit at the point of booking. If you charge for an initial consultation, that is invoiced separately today.
Events, webinars and SMS
No public event or seminar booking with seat limits, and reminders go by email rather than SMS. Both are on the list; neither is in this release.
Why the list is short. A scheduling integration that half works costs a practice more than one that does not exist, because somebody still checks the other calendar — and in scheduling, a half-working integration means a double booking in front of a client. See how the Microsoft 365 integration works
A meeting only pays off when the client, the job and the record are the same thing
CRM and pipeline
Where the enquiry and the deal come from, and where a discovery call is booked without leaving the record.
Jobs and workflow
Where an agreed action becomes a task with an owner and a date.
Forms and requests
How the things the client left owing you actually reach them, and get chased.
Workflow templates
Where a recurring client meeting becomes a step in the process rather than a reminder.
E-signature and approvals
What happens when the meeting ends with something that needs signing.
Audit trail
Who met, when, what was agreed, and whether it was done.
The things that decide whether a booking link actually gets used
Where does my availability come from?
Your Outlook calendar, read live. Existing appointments, leave and the meeting type's buffers are removed before a slot is offered, so there is no second calendar to keep in step and no window in which a client can book a time you have already filled.
Does it work with Google Calendar?
Not in this release. Availability is read from Microsoft 365 only. If your practice runs on Google Workspace, scheduling will not work for you yet.
Does the client need an account to book?
No. They open a link, pick a slot and confirm. It works in a phone browser, and rescheduling or cancelling uses the same link. Every one of those actions writes back to the client record.
What goes into the agenda, and who decides?
The meeting type decides which elements are included — open jobs, outstanding requests, the next deadline, anything awaiting signature, the last meeting's outcome. The content is assembled from that client's record at the moment of booking. A person can still add to it before the meeting.
What actually happens to what we agree in the meeting?
You record the outcome, and each action is raised as the thing it really is: a task on a job, a request to the client, a deal on the pipeline, or a follow-up meeting. Each carries an owner and a date. Nothing is left as a note that depends on somebody re-reading it.
Does it record or transcribe the meeting?
No. There is no recording, no transcript and no automatic summary in this release. An outcome is written by a person, which is the only reason the record can be relied on to say what was actually decided.
Can a client book “whoever is free” rather than a named partner?
Yes, for meeting types set to a pool — typically discovery calls. The booking resolves to the next person in the rota with availability. Client-specific meetings resolve to the role on that client's record, with a named deputy behind it.
Can we use it for internal meetings?
Yes. A meeting type can be marked practice-only, which keeps it off any client-facing link. Review clinics and planning sessions are the common cases.
What stops people not turning up?
Reminders run from the meeting type rather than from whoever booked it, so the cadence is the same for every client and happens whether or not the owner is at their desk. A cancellation records a reason and notifies the owner, rather than being a silence somebody notices later.
Can we charge for an initial consultation at the point of booking?
Not in this release. A booking cannot take a payment or hold a deposit. If you charge for a first meeting, it is invoiced separately today.
Bring the last booking thread you had
The real one — six replies over four days to find twenty minutes. In thirty minutes we will set that meeting up as a type against your own Outlook diary, and you will see what the client would have seen instead.
30-minute session · your own diary · no credit card