Documentation

Getting started

Sign up with Xero

FNA Manager uses Xero for sign-in — there's no separate username or password. To get started:

1. Click Sign in with Xero from any page on our website.
2. Xero will ask which organisation you want to connect. Pick the one you run your trades business from.
3. Authorise FNA Manager to read your accounting data. Xero will show you exactly what we're asking permission for.
4. You'll land on the dashboard. Your contacts, invoices, bills, employees, and assets begin syncing in the background.

That's it. The first sync usually finishes within a few minutes, depending on how much data you have. You can start exploring the app while it runs.

What syncs from Xero

When you connect, we bring across:

• Contacts — customers and suppliers.
• Invoices — both customer invoices (revenue) and supplier bills (expenses). Only authorised and paid invoices are shown; drafts stay in Xero.
• Employees — from Xero Payroll NZ, if you use it.
• Fixed assets — your asset register.
• Chart of accounts and tracking categories — fetched live when you need them.
• Financial reports — P&L and balance sheet numbers are pulled from Xero to power your dashboard.

We also keep syncing in the background — new invoices in Xero show up in FNA Manager automatically. If you change a contact's name in Xero, it'll update here next time we sync.

Note: contacts and employees are managed in Xero, not FNA Manager. To add a new customer or staff member, do it in Xero and they'll appear here shortly after. See Xero's guides: add a contact · add an employee (NZ Payroll).

Your free trial

Every new account gets a two-month free trial with full access to every feature. We don't ask for a credit card up front. If FNA Manager is helping you, you can add a payment method to continue past the trial. If it isn't, you can simply stop using it — no cancellation required.

Accepting the terms

The first time you sign in, you'll be asked to accept our terms and conditions. This is a one-off step. After you accept, you'll go straight to the dashboard on future sign-ins.

The dashboard

Your dashboard is the first screen you see. It's designed to answer one question: am I going to be OK over the next few weeks? Everything else in FNA Manager feeds into this view.

Liquidity chart

The main chart shows a six-week rolling window — two weeks of history and four weeks of projection. On one line it plots your actual bank balance over time; on top of that, it layers:

• Incoming money — invoices your customers owe you, placed on the date they're due.
• Outgoing money — bills, scheduled tax payments, hire-purchase instalments, and your daily running costs.
• Retention payments — shown on the dates they're scheduled to be released.

Overdue invoices and bills roll forward to tomorrow on the chart, so you see them land as soon as you'd want to chase (or pay) them.

Key numbers

Above the chart you'll see cards showing the headline numbers:

• Bank — total across all your bank accounts. Click to see each account individually.
• Revenue — outstanding invoices due in the period shown.
• Outgoings — bills, daily running costs, hire-purchase payments and taxes landing in the period.
• Taxes — anything scheduled to be paid to the IRD this period.

Click any card to drill into the list behind the number.

Low tide

Low tide is the single most useful number on the dashboard. It's the lowest point your bank balance is projected to hit over the coming weeks, and the date that happens. If low tide is comfortable, you can relax. If it's close to your overdraft limit, you know you need to chase payments or slow spending.

Return on effort

Below the liquidity chart is the return-on-effort chart. This shows your monthly margin — revenue minus costs — but grouped by when the work was actually done, not when the invoice was raised. That matches your effort to the income it produced.

Invoices dated on or before your payment-terms day count toward the previous month (the work you did before you sent the invoice). Invoices after that day count toward the current month. Costs include timesheets, staff wages, equipment, and bills against each job. The 12-month, 6-month, and 3-month rolling averages show your trend.

Jobs & job costing

Job costing is the heart of FNA Manager. A job is a single project or site — a bathroom renovation, a new build, a section of road. For each job, FNA Manager pulls together the revenue (customer invoices) and all the costs (bills, staff time, equipment time) so you can see the real margin at any point, not just at the end.

Creating a job

1. Go to Jobs in the main menu.
2. Click New Job.
3. Fill in:
   • Job code — defaults to the next number in your sequence. You can override it if you use a specific code scheme.
   • Manager — the employee responsible for this job.
   • Client — pick from your synced Xero contacts, or create a new one inline.
   • Job name, address, description — for your own reference.
   • Price — an optional estimate of what the job should bring in, used later to compare against actuals.
4. Optionally link a Xero tracking category when you create the job — this is the easiest way to pull historical and future invoices against it automatically.
5. Click Create. Jobs start in the Active tab.

Xero tracking categories (the shortcut)

There are two ways to link invoices and bills to a job: manually from inside FNA Manager, or automatically by tagging them in Xero with a tracking category. If you already use tracking categories in Xero to code things to jobs, this is a huge time-saver.

Step 1 — in Xero:

1. In Xero, go to Accounting → Advanced → Tracking categories. (Xero's own walkthrough: Set up tracking categories and options.)
2. Add a category (e.g. "Job" or "Project") if you don't already have one. Xero allows two categories per organisation.
3. Add an option for each job you want to track. Many FNA Manager customers create one per active job.
4. On each invoice and bill in Xero, tag the relevant line items with the correct option.

Step 2 — in FNA Manager:

1. Go to Settings (under your business name, top right).
2. Scroll to the Xero Settings section.
3. Under Job tracking category, pick the Xero category you just set up and click Update.
4. If you use a second tracking category for vehicles or equipment, set it under Plant & equipment tracking category the same way.

From here, when you create a new job you'll be able to link it to a specific tracking option. Every invoice or bill in Xero tagged with that option will be automatically attached to the job — including future ones.

Assigning invoices & bills to jobs manually

If you don't use tracking categories, or you want to assign an invoice that wasn't tagged, you can do it by hand:

1. Go to Finances → Revenue (for customer invoices) or Finances → Expenses (for bills).
2. Find the invoice and click Assign.
3. For each line item, choose what to allocate it to:
   • A job (for project revenue or costs)
   • A piece of equipment (for gear-specific costs — fuel, repairs, hire purchase)
   • A staff member (for employee-specific costs — tools, training, PPE)
4. Pick the chart-of-accounts code for the allocation.
5. Click Save.

Once every dollar on an invoice has been allocated, it's marked reconciled and drops off your follow-up list.

Auto-importing existing invoices

If you set up a tracking category after you already have invoices in Xero, don't worry — you can pull them in retrospectively:

1. Open the job you want to import into.
2. Click Import invoices.
3. Pick the tracking category and option to match.
4. Toggle Live import on if you want future invoices tagged the same way to also flow in automatically.
5. Click Save. FNA Manager processes the import in the background — you'll see invoices appear on the job within a minute or two.

You can remove an import later; when you do, the invoices pulled in by that rule are unattached from the job (they stay in Xero, of course).

Reading job profitability

On the jobs list, every active job has four numbers next to it:

• Revenue — total of all invoices attached to the job.
• Expenses — bills attached to the job, plus the cost of staff timesheets and equipment time logged against it.
• Balance — revenue minus expenses. This is what the job has earned you so far.
• Margin % — balance as a percentage of revenue.

Click through to a job to see a full breakdown: line items on every invoice and bill, timesheet entries by week, equipment hours, and a running total at the bottom.

Exporting a job

From the job detail page, click Export to download a file with the full breakdown. Useful for handing to your accountant, your client, or a project manager.

Finances

Finances overview

The Finances → Overview page is a single-screen snapshot of where the business sits right now. It shows total outstanding revenue, total outgoings (bills + taxes + hire purchases + discretionary spend + last month's payroll + operating expenses), and the balance between them. Each line is clickable and takes you to the detail page behind it.

Revenue (invoices)

Under Finances → Revenue you'll find every customer invoice from Xero — authorised and paid. You can search by date, contact, invoice number, or amount. Each row shows:

• Due date (red if overdue)
• Contact name and invoice number
• Total excluding GST and amount still owing
• Reconciliation status — whether every line has been allocated to a job, piece of equipment, or staff member

Click Assign on any invoice to allocate its lines. See Assigning invoices to jobs above.

Expenses (bills)

Finances → Expenses works the same way as Revenue, but for supplier invoices (bills). Assign each line to the job, piece of equipment, or staff member it was spent on, and the cost will show up in that job or equipment's running total.

Putting an invoice on hold

Sometimes you want to exclude an invoice from your calculations temporarily — for example, if there's a dispute with the customer and you don't want it counted as expected revenue. On the invoice edit page, tick Put this invoice on hold and record the reason. The invoice stays in Xero and in FNA Manager, but stops influencing your dashboard numbers until you clear the hold.

Taxes

The Taxes page gives you two things: an estimate of what you're likely to owe, and a place to record when payments are due.

Tax estimates are calculated using the standard NZ 28% company tax rate:

• Accumulated tax YTD — 28% of your year-to-date net profit. This is roughly what you'd owe if your financial year ended today.
• Estimated provisional tax — last financial year's tax plus the IRD's standard 5% uplift.
• Projected yearly tax — accumulated tax scaled to a full year, so you can plan ahead.

Recording tax payments:

1. Fill in the form: pick a type (GST, FBT, RWT, or Provisional), enter the amount and due date.
2. If it's a recurring obligation — e.g. monthly PAYE or two-monthly GST — set Repeat for to the number of periods and FNA Manager will create the future records for you.
3. Click Add. It'll appear on your dashboard in the outgoings for the period it falls in.

Tick a tax as paid once you've paid it, and it'll move from the Outstanding to the Paid tab.

Chart of accounts

Why it matters

Your chart of accounts in Xero is how every transaction is categorised. If it's set up well, you can answer useful questions like how much did I earn from dayworks last quarter, and how much did it cost me to deliver? If it's not, your reports are a wall of numbers you can't easily compare.

FNA Manager reads your chart of accounts straight from Xero, so the setup happens in Xero. Then in FNA Manager, you tell us which accounts go together. If you need to add or rename accounts, Xero has a step-by-step guide.

Pairing income and cost accounts

The most useful thing you can do is pair income accounts with their matching cost accounts. A common example in the trades:

Your account codes don't have to match this exact pattern — what matters is that each income account has a cost account that captures what it took to earn it. Talk to your accountant if yours isn't set up this way; most will happily tidy it up for you.

Setting up groupings in FNA Manager

1. Go to Settings.
2. Under Xero Settings, click Manage groupings.
3. Click New.
4. For Account 1, pick your income account (e.g. "210 — Dayworks Income").
5. For Account 2, pick the matching cost account (e.g. "310 — Dayworks Costs").
6. Click Create.

Repeat for each pair you want to compare. You can delete a grouping anytime if it's no longer useful.

Plant & equipment

Track every ute, digger, scaffold, generator, and tool your business owns. FNA Manager calculates what each piece is really costing you and how hard it's working.

Adding equipment

1. Go to Admin → Plant & Equipment.
2. Click New.
3. Fill in:
   • Type — Heavy plant, Light plant, Equipment, Gear, or Decommissioned.
   • Name or identifier — rego plate, fleet number, whatever you use day-to-day.
   • Assigned to — the employee it lives with (optional).
   • Purchase date and cost — used for the cost-per-hour calculation.
   • Notes — WoF dates, maintenance reminders, anything you need handy.
4. If it's on a hire purchase or lease, complete the finance section (see below).
5. Optionally link a Xero tracking-category option — future fuel, repair and maintenance bills tagged in Xero will automatically flow to this piece of equipment.

Equipment groups

Group related items together (e.g. "Vehicles", "Compactors", "Tools") to see pool-level averages. On the equipment list, each group shows its average actual cost per hour and pool utilisation. Manage groups from the Equipment groups button on the equipment page.

WoF, CoF, and test & tag reminders

A compliance date that rolls around three months after you last thought about it tends to become an expensive surprise. FNA Manager keeps track of three dates per piece of equipment so nothing expires without warning:

• WoF / CoF next due — for vehicles. Warrant of Fitness for light vehicles, Certificate of Fitness for heavy and commercial vehicles. One field covers both.
• Test & tag next due — for electrical tools, leads, and portable appliances. Testing intervals vary by how the gear is used (gear on a damp construction site needs testing more often than office kit). Test & tag isn't legally mandatory in New Zealand, but electrical equipment must be kept in a safe condition under the Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010 — AS/NZS 3760 (the test & tag standard) is the usual way to demonstrate it. WorkSafe's guidance covers who's responsible and how often.
• Next maintenance date — scheduled service intervals for plant and machinery (oil change on a digger, greasing a compactor, annual inspection of scaffolding).

To set a reminder:

1. Open the equipment item (from Admin → Plant & Equipment).
2. Fill in the date under WoF/CoF next due, Test & tag next due, or Next maintenance date.
3. Save.

What you'll get: three reminder emails per date, sent to the person responsible for the equipment:

• One month before the due date
• One week before
• On the day itself

Who gets the email: the staff member assigned to that piece of equipment (the Assigned to field on the equipment item). Their email comes across from Xero Payroll, so no extra setup is needed on your end. If the equipment isn't assigned to anyone, or the assigned person doesn't have an email in Xero, the reminder goes to every user on the FNA Manager account as a safety net — nothing falls through the cracks.

After the WoF is renewed or the test & tag round is done, update the date on the equipment item and the cycle starts again from the new date. Past dates are kept in a history log on each item so you've got a clean paper trail if you're ever asked for one.

AAC and utilisation — what they mean

Average actual cost (AAC) is what each piece of equipment costs you per hour of productive use, including:

• The purchase cost (spread across its life)
• Fuel and consumables
• Repairs and maintenance
• Insurance, registration, parts — any bill you've assigned to it

Compare this against what you charge clients for using that piece of equipment. If your charge-out rate is lower than your AAC, you're losing money every time it runs.

Utilisation is the percentage of available hours the equipment is actually working — based on timesheets logged against jobs. Low utilisation on an expensive machine is a warning sign. High utilisation on a cheap one might justify an upgrade.

Hire purchase and leases

When you add equipment financed on HP or a lease, enter:

• Finance type — Own, Lease, or HP
• Payment amount
• Frequency — Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly
• Term — number of months remaining

FNA Manager deducts each scheduled payment from your projected bank balance on the day of the month it's due, so your dashboard shows the real cashflow impact of your fleet.

Staff

How staff sync

Your staff come in from Xero Payroll NZ. If you run payroll through Xero, every active employee will appear in FNA Manager under Admin → Staff. To add or remove a staff member, do it in Xero and they'll sync across — see Xero's guide to adding a permanent employee (NZ).

Staff groups (L1 to L4)

New accounts come with four default categories:

• L1 — Senior management
• L2 — Middle management
• L3 — Lower management / leading hands
• L4 — General workforce

Categorising your team lets FNA Manager show pool-level cost and utilisation for each group. You can rename the defaults, create custom categories (e.g. "Apprentices", "Subbies"), or leave everyone ungrouped — it's up to you. Manage categories from Staff groups on the staff page.

Staff cost and utilisation

For each staff member, FNA Manager shows:

• AAC — their fully-loaded hourly cost, including wages, PAYE, KiwiSaver, tools, training, PPE, and any bills assigned to them.
• Utilisation — the percentage of their available hours they've logged against billable jobs via timesheets.
• Start date and last pay rise — useful reminders.

Staff who have left appear in the Decommissioned section with their end date, so historical job costs still make sense.

Timesheets

Timesheets are how FNA Manager learns where your staff and equipment spent their time — which is how it calculates job costs and utilisation. You need at least one job created before you can enter a timesheet.

Entering a timesheet

1. Go to Admin → Timesheets.
2. Find the staff member or piece of equipment you want to enter time for. Overdue rows are highlighted.
3. Click New timesheet.
4. Pick the week ending date from the dropdown (only weeks without an entry are shown).
5. For each job the person or piece of equipment worked on, enter the hours. The charge-out rate pre-fills from their category but can be overridden.
6. Click Save.

Entries are stored per week, per job, per person or machine — so historical costing stays stable even if you change rates later.

Equipment timesheets

Log hours for equipment the same way you do for staff. When you enter a staff timesheet, any equipment assigned to that person is shown first in the list, so you can quickly attribute its time to the same jobs.

Bonds & retentions

Bonds

Track performance bonds you've lodged against jobs so you don't forget about them. Each bond has a status (pending, active, or released), an indemnity date (when you're due to get it back), the client, the job, the amount, and free-form notes.

To create a bond:

1. Go to Admin → Bonds.
2. Click New. You must have at least one job first.
3. Pick the job — the client auto-fills from the job.
4. Enter the indemnity date, amount, and any notes.
5. Click Create. New bonds start as pending; edit them to mark as active once lodged, or released once returned.

Bonds with an indemnity date coming up in the next month are highlighted on your dashboard so nothing slips through.

Retentions

Retentions work like bonds, but with a payment schedule. This is for the part of your invoice the client is holding back until the job's done and defects are cleared.

To create a retention:

1. Go to Admin → Retentions.
2. Click New.
3. Pick the job. The client auto-fills.
4. Enter the completion date, the total amount held, and any notes.
5. Build out the payment schedule: one row per scheduled release, with the date, amount, and terms (e.g. "50% on practical completion", "50% 12 months after practical completion").
6. Click Create.

Upcoming retention payments show as future incomings on your dashboard. Tick each payment as paid once it lands, and the retention will move from active to complete once everything is settled.

Contacts & assets

Clients & suppliers

The Admin → Clients & Suppliers page lists every contact from Xero, split into two columns — customers on the left, suppliers on the right. This is a read-only view; to add, rename, or remove a contact, do it in Xero and it'll sync across. Xero's guides: add a contact · edit a contact.

Fixed assets

Your Xero fixed asset register shows up under Admin → Assets, grouped by asset type. This is useful for cross-checking what's on your balance sheet against what's physically in the yard. Additions and disposals still happen in Xero.

Settings

Access settings from the dropdown under your business name in the top-right of any page.

Finance settings

• Payment terms day — the day of the month your invoices typically fall due (e.g. 20th of the month following invoice). Used to split revenue across months for the return-on-effort chart.
• Overdraft limit — your bank's overdraft cap. Shown on the dashboard so you can see how close you're flying to it.
• Buffer / reserve — the amount you like to keep on top of zero as a safety margin. The low-tide calculation flags when you're going to breach it.
• Expected discretionary spend per month — non-bill money that still leaves the account (owner's drawings, small cash purchases, etc.). Included in your daily running-cost estimate.

Xero tracking categories

See Xero tracking categories above for how these work. You can set two: one for jobs, one for plant & equipment. These should match tracking categories that already exist in your Xero organisation.

Job numbering

The Next job number field controls what code is suggested for the next job you create. Change it if you want to jump ahead to a different series, or match an existing numbering scheme.

Your account

Multiple Xero organisations

If you manage more than one business in Xero, you can connect each one to FNA Manager. Each becomes a separate tenant with its own jobs, equipment, and staff. To switch between them, click your business name in the top-right and choose Accounts and users. Pick the organisation you want and FNA Manager will reload with that business's data.

Other team members from the same Xero organisation can also sign in — the subscription covers everyone who needs access.

Billing & plans

Go to Billing from the dropdown under your business name. What you see depends on where you are in your subscription:

• On trial — you'll see the available plans. No action is needed until your trial ends.
• Trial ended / subscription cancelled — a notice appears at the top, and you'll be prompted to pick a plan to regain access.
• Subscribed — your current plan and monthly price are shown, with your payment history below.

To subscribe to a plan:

1. Click Subscribe on the plan you want.
2. You'll be taken to Stripe's secure checkout to enter your card details.
3. After payment, you'll land back in FNA Manager with full access restored.

To update your payment method or view invoices:

1. On the Billing page, click Manage Billing.
2. You'll be taken to the Stripe customer portal, where you can update your card, download invoices, and see all past charges.

Cancelling your subscription

There's no contract and no cancellation fee. To cancel:

1. Go to Billing from the menu under your business name.
2. Click Manage Billing. This takes you to the Stripe customer portal.
3. In Stripe, click Cancel plan.
4. Confirm the cancellation.

Your access continues until the end of the current billing period. After that, you won't be charged again, and you'll see the "subscription cancelled" notice on the billing page if you sign back in. You can resubscribe any time by picking a plan again — none of your data is deleted.

If you'd rather have a person handle the cancellation for you, or something's gone wrong, get in touch — we'll sort it.

Getting help

Can't find what you're looking for? We're based in New Zealand and a real person will read your message. Get in touch and we'll usually come back to you within a business day.