Skip to main content
← All research

Product analysis / FYI — practice management for accounting firms

How FYI runs an accounting client for a year

One new client, two GST periods and one set of annual accounts, followed step by step to see exactly what a practice-management tool does — and what it leaves to Xero and the accountant.

Subject
FYI, practice management for accounting firms
Format
Step-by-step walkthrough
Length
21 steps · about 10 min
Published
September 2026

Step 01 / 21

The case

The case 01

One client, three jobs, one year

Rather than describe FYI in the abstract, this walkthrough follows a single new client through a full year. Southern Lakes Consulting Ltd files GST every six months and needs annual accounts at 31 March.

The tax dates are not the point. What matters is how FYI organises the three jobs those dates create — and how little of the actual accounting it touches along the way.

The brief

Client
Southern Lakes Consulting Ltd
GST
Six-month periods
Period 1
1 Apr 2026 → 30 Sep 2026
Period 2
1 Oct 2026 → 31 Mar 2027
Balance date
31 March
Also due
Annual Accounts 2027

Use the ← and → keys to move between steps.

About this report

A worked example, not a product review

Southern Lakes Consulting Ltd is invented, and the sequence is a typical New Zealand accounting-firm year rather than a description of any one firm’s configuration. The point of following it this closely is the boundary it exposes: FYI manages the work around the accounting, and that turns out to be a generic workflow engine wearing an accounting-shaped domain model.

That separation — engine below, domain model and templates above — is the same shape I reach for when scoping a first version of a vertical tool.

All research →Startup MVP development →