How a small accounting practice runs its client work
A practice whose year is a calendar of obligations and the evidence behind each one. Below, one client’s work runs end to end, and the places a person has to say yes are marked. Your ledger stays your ledger.
Four businesses on this site run on the same building blocks, arranged for days that look nothing alike. This page is the arrangement for an accounting practice, where a job is an engagement and the stock is your people’s time.
Who it is for
For New Zealand accounting and bookkeeping firms of two to twenty people, where the partners do the client work and the admin is whoever has a spare hour: who is engaged for what, what came in from which client, what time went where, and which invoices are still unpaid. It suits a firm that already has good tax and ledger software and wants the practice’s own record kept without adding a staff member to keep it.
One client, from the engagement to the invoice
Three things start a step. Somebody asks the agent in the channel the team already talks in. Something arrives in a connected mailbox. Or a date comes round on a job. Asking happens in the chat; approving happens in the admin app, signed in, because the sign-in the agent holds cannot approve anything.
A new client becomes a customer, and the engagement becomes a job
Told about the new client in the chat, the agent creates the customer with its entity details and contacts, writes up the notes from the first meeting against it, and opens the engagement as a job underneath.
The compliance calendar is jobs with dates
The agent reads the template for that engagement type and opens the year’s obligations as jobs with their tasks and their dates. A GST return, an annual return, a set of financials: each one is on the board before anybody has to remember it exists.
The document checklist says what has come in
The template’s tasks are the checklist. The mailbox poll runs on a schedule, and records arriving in the connected mailbox are read out of it and filed against the client with a version chain, so a corrected statement supersedes the one it replaces and both are kept.
The chasing runs on the rules you switched on
A rule reminds before a date and follows up on what is outstanding, by email or as a notification in the admin app. The agent reads the checklist across every client and raises what is missing with you.
When a client does not send the record, the checklist task stays open and the rule keeps reminding on the schedule you set. A reminder from a rule you switched on goes out on its own. A message the agent writes waits in the queue.
Time is recorded against the client and the engagement
From the desk, or from the phone app for people who spend the day at clients’ premises. The hours sit on the engagement they belong to.
Queries are tasks on the client’s file
A question out and the answer back are a task with an owner and a date. Whoever is covering can read where it got to.
The invoice is raised from the time or the fixed fee
The agent reads what was recorded against the engagement and raises the invoice with your branding.
It waits in the approval queue. A signed-in person sends it.
Payments are recorded against the invoice
What a client still owes is a figure on the client’s record.
The ledger stays the ledger
None of this is your accounting system and none of it tries to be. Xero and the practice tools you already run stay the systems of record for the numbers. This is the record of who did what, when, for how long, and what was sent to whom.
Questions we get asked
Does this replace our practice management or tax software?
No. It keeps the practice’s own operating record: clients, engagements, time, documents and invoices, with an agent doing the data entry. Your tax software, your ledger and your client portals stay where they are, and when we set the agent up we connect it to what you already run.
Can the agent email a client on its own?
No. The agent drafts an invoice, a document share or a follow-up, and files it as a proposal that shows exactly what would go out. A signed-in person of your firm approves it. The platform enforces that; it is not a setting the agent can change.
Where is client information stored?
On cloud infrastructure operated by Railway and Vercel, currently outside New Zealand. Under the Privacy Act 2020 we may disclose information to an overseas provider only where it will be subject to comparable safeguards; our agreements with these providers require that. The privacy policy lists who handles what.
Do staff have to clock in from a phone?
No. Time can be entered from the desk against the engagement it belongs to. The phone app is there for people who move between the office and clients’ premises and want the clock-in matched to where they are.
We set it up with you
A small firm has no one whose job is the AI. We map how work moves through your practice, stand up the agent, connect it to your Xero and your email, and stay until your team is running it.