FigsFlow › Platform › Run the work › Firm dashboard
The state of the firm, without the Monday export
A partner-level view of deadlines, review queues, capacity and unbilled work — assembled from the records your team already keeps, not from four spreadsheets somebody rebuilds every Monday. What it shows is what needs a decision this week.
Partner, start with the two views in the tour below. Practice manager, go straight to why the number is always out of date.
- Built inside working firms, not a lab
- Microsoft 365 native — your data stays in your tenant
- Founding-customer program open now
One screen
- At risk7 jobs · deadline inside 5 days
- At review14 · oldest waiting 6 days
- Blocked by client9 jobs · 4 chased twice
- Capacity next week104% · two people over
- Unbilled$61.2k · 18 jobs delivered
nothing here was entered for the dashboard — it is the same records the work already runs on
A dashboard for accounting firms, reported at source
The product experience
The same records, seen by a partner and by a manager
A partner wants to know whether the firm will make the season and where the money is. A manager wants to know which eleven jobs need moving today. Switch between the two, change the period, then move through the panels on the left to look around.
All figures in this panel are illustrative sample data from a fictional firm. This is a read-only prototype.
Not metrics — a list of things that will go wrong if nobody touches them. Sort any column; click a row to see what the firm would actually do about it.
- 7Deadline inside 5 days3 not started
- 14Sitting at reviewoldest 6 days
- 9Blocked by client4 chased twice
- 3No ownerescalated to you
| Stage | Flag | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Form 1120-S | Beaumont Retail Group | Manager review | 4 | At review 6d |
| Monthly close — Feb | Kirby Logistics Co | Adjusting entries | 1 | Not started |
| Form 1065 | Sterling Estates LLC | Awaiting K-1 data | 4 | Blocked by client |
| Sales tax — multi-state | Whitmore Fabrication | Preparation | 9 | No owner |
| Payroll setup | Ashford Medical Partners | Client documents | 7 | Chased twice |
| Form 1040 pack | Nolan Family | Partner sign-off | 35 | On track |
In the live product every row opens the job. The dashboard is a way into the work, not a report about it.
Deadlines grouped by statutory date. “Not started” is the only column that predicts anything — the rest describe work already moving.
| Deadline | At review | Ready to file | Extended | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| March 15 — 1120-S / 1065 | 38 | 4 | 11 | 19 | 4 |
| March 20 — sales tax | 27 | 6 | 3 | 18 | — |
| April 15 — 1040 / 1120 | 214 | 63 | 22 | 98 | 31 |
| April 30 — payroll returns | 18 | 2 | 1 | 15 | — |
| September 15 — extended | 35 | 35 | — | — | — |
Sort by “not started” and April 15 moves to the top three weeks before anyone would have felt it.
Review is where jobs go quiet. This panel exists because “waiting on the manager” is invisible in most firms until the deadline is close.
| Service | Longest | Review points raised | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Form 1120-S | 3.4d | 9d | 2.1 per job |
| Form 1040 | 1.2d | 5d | 0.7 per job |
| Monthly close | 2.8d | 11d | 1.4 per job |
| Sales tax | 0.9d | 4d | 0.4 per job |
Review points per job tells you whether the bottleneck is the reviewer or the preparation.
Budgeted hours from jobs already scheduled, against each person’s available week. Move the slider to reassign hours off the two people who are over, and watch what it costs the people who are not.
Two people over, three with room, one week’s notice. That is a reassignment conversation, not a hiring decision.
Illustrative arithmetic on sample data. The live product moves the job, not a slider — and the budgeted hours come from the workflow template.
Work delivered and not yet invoiced, aged. Unbilled work is the most expensive thing a firm forgets, and it is invisible until somebody runs a report.
- $61.2kUnbilledacross 18 delivered jobs
- $14.8kOver 60 days4 jobs
- 11Over budgethours beyond estimate
- $4.9kOut-of-scope loggednot yet quoted
| Age | Owner action | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–30 days | 9 | $28.4k | Invoice on completion |
| 31–60 days | 5 | $18.0k | Confirm scope, then bill |
| 61–90 days | 3 | $11.1k | Partner review |
| Over 90 days | 1 | $3.7k | Write off or bill |
Out-of-scope time logged against a job is the earliest signal that a fixed fee no longer matches the work.
Jobs the firm cannot progress. Separating “we are late” from “they are late” is the difference between an apology and a conversation.
| Client | Waiting on | Chases | Deadline | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sterling Estates LLC | K-1 data, 3 shareholders | 18 | 2 | Mar 15 |
| Ashford Medical Partners | Payroll registers | 12 | 2 | Mar 18 |
| Turner Properties | Bank statements, Q4 | 9 | 1 | Mar 31 |
| Harper Dental Group | Signed 8879-S | 4 | 1 | Mar 15 |
| Marlow Studio LLC | Prior-year return | 21 | 3 | Apr 15 |
Chase count and request date come from the job itself, so this list needs nobody to maintain it.
Partner only. Fewer rows, longer horizon, and every figure a by-product of work already recorded.
- 96Jobs in flightacross 6 services
- 88On-time filing %rolling 12 months
- 2.4Services per clientcross-sell headroom
- $61.2kUnbilled18 jobs delivered
| Service | Budgeted | Actual | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Form 1040 individual | 214 | 481h | 516h | +7% |
| Form 1120-S | 38 | 247h | 239h | −3% |
| Monthly close — CAS | 46 | 552h | 638h | +16% |
| Sales tax multi-state | 27 | 81h | 78h | −4% |
| Payroll | 18 | 27h | 26h | −4% |
A 16% overrun on recurring close work is a pricing conversation — and the single hardest number for a firm to produce by hand.
This is the read-only tour. Opening a job from a row, reassigning work, changing a deadline and exporting a view all happen in the live product — we do those with your own service list on the call.
- Risk before it is lateJobs are flagged on the step that has slipped, not on the day the deadline passes.
- Review made visibleTime at review, per reviewer, per service — the bottleneck most firms cannot see at all.
- Capacity as a forecastBudgeted hours on scheduled jobs, not a retrospective read of timesheets.
- Unbilled, agedDelivered work that has not been invoiced, with the jobs that ran over budget beside it.
The problem
By the time the number is assembled, it is describing a firm that no longer exists
Somebody in the firm spends the first two hours of every Monday building a picture. Job list out of the practice system. Timesheets out of the billing tool. A tab for deadlines that is maintained by hand. A partner asks how the season is going and gets an answer sourced from four exports and one person’s memory.
The picture is honest on Monday morning. By Tuesday afternoon a client has sent the documents everyone was waiting for, two jobs have gone to review, and one has quietly gone on extension. Nobody updates the spreadsheet, because updating it is a job in itself.
The reporting is not the problem. It is the symptom. The problem is that the firm’s work and the firm’s view of its work are two separate artifacts — so the view is only ever as fresh as the last person who rebuilt it, and the decisions that matter get made against a snapshot that is already three days stale.
One question, four sources
- The practice systemJob list, exported to ExcelStale on export
Accurate at the moment of export and never again.
- The billing toolTime and WIP, a separate loginDifferent client names
Reconciled by hand before anything can be compared.
- The deadline trackerOne tab per service, typed datesManually maintained
Correct until the first extension nobody logged.
- The manager’s headWhat is actually going onUnwritten
The most accurate source, and the one that takes annual leave.
Four sources, one question, and no version of the answer that survives the afternoon. A firm dashboard is worth having only if nobody has to build it.
Where it sits in the flow
It reports the work. It does not ask anyone to report on the work.
Every figure on the dashboard is a by-product of something a person did to move a job forward. Nobody fills in a status, nobody updates a percentage, and there is no weekly form. That is the whole design, and it is why the numbers can be trusted on a Thursday.
- 01
- 02
- 03
- 04
- 05
- 01Work is recorded once
A job is created from a template, a task is completed, a document arrives, an hour is logged. Ordinary work, recorded where it happens.
Jobs and deadlines - 02Stage and date come from the job
Because tasks carry owners and due dates, “at review” and “at risk” are states the system already knows. Nothing is inferred.
Workflow templates - 03You are hereThe dashboard reads it
Deadlines, review queue, capacity, unbilled and client blockers, on one screen, for the whole firm or one person.
- 04The decision happens in the product
Reassign the job, chase the client, move a date, raise the invoice — from the row, not from a note about the row.
Team and capacity - 05And the view updates itself
The next person to open the dashboard sees the consequence. There is no publish step, and no Monday rebuild.
Time and billing
- Jobs and tasks — stage, owner, due date and what has slipped
- Workflow templates — budgeted hours per step, which is what makes capacity a forecast
- Client requests — what was asked for, when, and how many times it has been chased
- Time and billing — hours against budget, and work delivered but not invoiced
- Reassignment — a week’s notice on an overloaded person instead of a Friday surprise
- Fee conversations — overruns visible on the service, not discovered at year end
- Client accountability — blocked-by-client separated from late, with the chase history attached
- Partner time — the Monday rebuild stops being a task anyone owns
Where this is different
Most dashboards report the past. This one is a list of decisions.
Charts are easy. The hard part is being right at nine on a Thursday morning without anyone preparing it. Judge a firm dashboard on three things: where the data comes from, whether a row is actionable, and whether the numbers stay true when the week changes.
You already know every job in your practice. What you cannot see is the shape of next month — and unbilled work, which is where solo practices leak the most money.
The first size where nobody holds the whole picture. The dashboard replaces the conversation where three people each describe a different version of the same week.
Review capacity is the constraint, and the review queue is the panel that will change how you run the season. Capacity forecasting stops being optional here.
Several offices, one filing standard. The value moves from operations to governance: on-time filing rates, budget variance by service, and where partner attention is actually going.
Free, flexible and completely under your control. Also stale within a day, unreconciled between sources, and dependent on one person who will eventually take a holiday.
Genuinely powerful, and the charts are better than ours. But it reads copies of your data, refreshes on a schedule, and a row cannot be clicked to fix the thing it is complaining about.
Close to the work and usually accurate on jobs. The blind spots are the parts that live outside the job record — what was requested from the client, when, and how often it has been chased.
Live off the same records the work runs on. Every row opens the job it describes. Client requests, chases, budgeted hours and unbilled value are all on that record already.
| The test | Monday spreadsheet | BI tool | Practice suite reports | FigsFlow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How current is it | Last export | Last scheduled refresh | Live on jobs | Live, all panels |
| Can you act on a row | No | No | Sometimes | Every row opens the job |
| Does it see the client side | No | Only if fed | Rarely | Requests and chases included |
And where we are narrower, on purpose. There is no self-serve report builder in this version — you get a fixed set of panels that are enforced accurate at source, plus a full export for anything else. There is no scheduled email digest yet. And the dashboard reports the work inside FigsFlow; it does not pull figures from your general ledger or your tax software, so it is a picture of the practice rather than of the firm’s accounts.
Works with your stack
What it reaches, and what it does not
The dashboard is mostly internal — it reports on records that are already in FigsFlow. Three things reach outside it, and the rest of this section is what is not connected, because finding that out in February is worse than reading it now.
Sign in with the identity your firm already administers, and open a client’s documents from a dashboard row without leaving the record.
Entra ID SSO SharePoint documentsEvery panel exports to CSV or Excel with the filters you applied, so the fixed panel set is never a dead end for a partner who wants their own cut.
CSV / Excel Filters preservedA partner sees the firm. A manager sees their team. Everyone else sees their own work. Role decides the view, rather than a per-panel permission grid.
Partner Manager Team memberNo connection to your GL or to Drake, Lacerte, ProConnect or UltraTax. The dashboard reports the practice — the work being done — not the numbers inside a client’s books or return.
Not in this releaseThe panels are fixed. There is no drag-and-drop metric designer, no saved custom views and no calculated fields. Export covers the gap for now.
Fixed panel setNo emailed Monday summary and no threshold alerts. Someone has to open the dashboard — which, given the point of this page, we accept is an odd limitation to have.
Phase 2, no committed dateWhy the list is short. A dashboard that half-reports is worse than none, because a partner will act on it. We would rather ship three panels a firm can trust than nine that need a caveat.
Questions firms ask
The things that decide whether anyone opens it twice
What is a firm dashboard in practice management software?
A single screen showing the state of the firm’s work: which jobs are at risk of missing a deadline, what is waiting at review, who is over capacity next week, which clients are holding work up, and what has been delivered but not invoiced. In FigsFlow it is generated from the job, task, request and time records the firm already keeps, rather than assembled from exports.
How current are the numbers?
Live. There is no refresh schedule and no publish step. Completing a task, receiving a client document or logging an hour changes what the next person sees when they open the dashboard.
Does anyone have to update a status for this to work?
No, and that is deliberate. Every figure is derived from an action someone took to move work forward. A dashboard that depends on people remembering to update it becomes wrong in the first busy week, which is exactly when it matters.
Can I see just my team, or just one partner’s clients?
Yes. Role decides the default view — a partner sees the firm, a manager sees their team, a team member sees their own work — and any panel can be filtered by owner, service or deadline group.
What is the difference between “late” and “blocked by client”?
A job is blocked when the next step belongs to the client — a document request, a signature, an approval. It is late when the next step belongs to the firm. Separating the two is what makes an April fee conversation a conversation rather than an apology.
Can I build my own reports?
Not in this version. The panel set is fixed so that every figure can be enforced accurate at source. Every panel exports to CSV or Excel with your filters applied, so anything beyond the fixed set can be built outside the product.
Does it pull numbers from my general ledger or tax software?
No. This is a dashboard about the practice — the work being sold, scheduled, delivered and billed. It does not read a client’s books or the contents of a return.
How long before it is showing anything useful?
Deadlines and job stages are useful from the first week, because they come from jobs as soon as they exist. Capacity forecasting needs budgeted hours on your workflow templates, and budget-versus-actual needs a few weeks of recorded time before the variance means anything.
Where to start
Bring the spreadsheet you rebuild on Mondays
Whatever you currently open to answer “how are we doing” — the tracker, the export, the tab with the coloured cells. In thirty minutes we will show you which parts of it stop being a task, and which parts you would still have to do by hand.
30-minute session · your own tracker · no credit card
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