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. Accept our terms, then walk through a short setup wizard. Behind the scenes your contacts, invoices, bills, employees and assets begin syncing.

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 — the wizard tells you how the import is going.

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, paid and voided invoices are brought across; drafts stay in Xero.
• Employees — from Xero Payroll NZ, if you use it, along with their wage history and pay calendars.
• Fixed assets — your asset register, which you can create equipment records from.
• Chart of accounts and tracking categories — your accounts sync overnight; tracking categories are fetched live when you need them.
• Bank balances — refreshed every few hours, and used for the liquidity chart and the tax pot.
• Financial reports — P&L and balance sheet numbers power your dashboard, burn rate and tax estimates.
• GST returns and pay runs — used to work out what tax you owe and what you've already paid.

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. Staff must be added in Xero Payroll. Clients are the one exception — you can create one inline while making a job or an estimate, and we'll create it in Xero for you. See Xero's guides: add a contact · add an employee (NZ Payroll).

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 setup wizard

Straight after you accept the terms, we walk you through a short setup — five screens, three of which you actually fill in, and about two minutes all up. It runs once. Every step can be skipped, and anything you skip turns into a checklist on your dashboard so you can pick it up later.

Everything the wizard asks about also lives permanently under Settings (in the menu under your business name, top right), so nothing you set here is locked in.

1. Welcome

A quick overview while your Xero import runs. It shows you what has landed so far — contacts, invoices, employees, assets — and refreshes as the background sync works through it.

2. Connect your jobs to Xero

This is the important one. Xero tracking categories are how an invoice says which job it belongs to. Once you tell us which category you use for jobs, we read your Xero invoices straight into job costing — and every job you create in FNA Manager gets its tracking option created in Xero automatically.

If your Xero tracking categories aren't set up for jobs yet, we'll offer to do it for you. One click creates a Jobs category and a Plant & Equipment category — or renames the ones you already have to match. Xero only allows two tracking categories per organisation, so if you already have two, we rename rather than add. We show you exactly what will change in your Xero organisation and ask you to confirm before anything is sent, and the button only appears when your categories don't already match. Renaming won't disturb anything already coded to a category: invoices stay linked and your job costing history is unaffected.

You can also turn on match tracking options by name so future invoices link themselves. If you skip this step, any jobs you create before setting it won't be linked to your Xero invoices and you'd have to link them by hand later. Lives under Settings → Xero, where the same one-click setup is available if you'd rather sort it later.

3. Confirm your tax setup

We read your financial year end, GST basis and GST cycle straight from your Xero organisation, so this screen is mostly a check rather than a form. Add your provisional tax method and — if you have it to hand — last year's residual income tax off your IR4. Leave that blank and we'll estimate it until you add it.

You'll also confirm which Xero account holds each tax's balance, so we can read what's owed and paid automatically. If your chart of accounts is still importing, we'll remind you on your dashboard instead. Lives under Settings → Tax.

4. Your business numbers

Your next job number, overdraft facility, cash buffer, any recurring spend that isn't already in Xero as bills, and the day of the month your invoices typically fall due. These are what make the liquidity chart reflect your actual position — leaving the overdraft and buffer at zero makes the chart look far tighter than reality. Lives under Settings → General.

5. Done

The last screen points you at the three things worth doing once your Xero data has finished importing: charge-out rates for your staff, charge-out rates for your plant, and your first job.

Your setup checklist

After the wizard, a checklist sits at the top of your dashboard covering the setup that needs your Xero data to have finished importing:

• Connect your jobs to Xero, and your plant & equipment
• Confirm your tax settings and map your tax accounts
• Set charge-out rates for your staff and for your plant
• Create your first job

Each item ticks itself off as you complete it. You can dismiss the whole checklist once you're happy — nothing else changes if you do.

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.

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.

The cards along the top

• Coming In — everything owed to you across every unpaid invoice, including GST. The ex-GST figure sits underneath. Click it for a breakdown by client.
• Overdue (next to Coming In) — invoices past their due date. Only shows when you have some. Click to see and action them.
• Going Out — everything you owe, made up of four things: unpaid supplier bills (incl. GST), wages accrued since your last pay run, outstanding tax, and hire-purchase or lease payments falling due in the chart window. Click for the full breakdown.
• Overdue (next to Going Out) — bills past their due date, same idea.
• Bank — total across all your bank accounts. Click to see each account individually.
• Retentions — total retention currently held across all your jobs, with anything written off called out underneath. Click for a per-job breakdown. Only appears when you're holding retention — see Retentions.
• Bonds — performance bonds you've lodged. Only appears when you have active or pending bonds.

Liquidity chart

The main chart shows a six-week rolling window — about one week of history and five weeks of projection. There's a ? button beside its title that explains every line in detail; the short version:

• Bank (solid) — your actual daily bank balance up to today, then walked forward using only what's already in Xero.
• Projected bank (dashed) — the same walk, but also subtracting the costs you haven't entered yet: projected wages and projected operating expenses. This is the line low tide is read from.
• Coming In and Going Out — authorised invoices and bills incl. GST, sitting on their paid date, or their due date if still unpaid.
• Taxes, and a dashed Tax (estimated) for GST that's still building up or filed-but-not-yet-firm, plus accrued FBT/RWT on its next filing deadline.
• Reference lines — today, upcoming paydays, and your overdraft and buffer from Settings.

Anything overdue and still unpaid rolls forward to tomorrow on the chart, so you see it land as soon as you'd want to chase (or pay) it — and it shuffles a day forward each day it stays unpaid.

Retentions are deliberately kept off this chart. They only become cash when you invoice them out, at which point they appear as an ordinary customer invoice — counting them twice would overstate what's coming in. Scheduled releases are listed separately under Upcoming Retention payments further down the dashboard.

Low tide and rock bottom

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. 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.

Rock bottom sits beside it when you have overdue invoices. Low tide assumes those overdue invoices get collected tomorrow; rock bottom strips them out entirely and shows the worst case if those customers keep you waiting. The gap between the two numbers is exactly what your debtors are costing you in risk.

You'll also see Last month's payroll (what actually went out the door in gross pay) and your daily burn rate (operating expenses including wages, averaged over four months so lumpy bills are smoothed out).

The detail behind it

Every card at the top opens a breakdown when you click it:

• Coming In by client — who owes you what, biggest first. Useful for spotting concentration risk.
• Outgoings breakdown — bills, accrued wages, tax and HP/lease, itemised, with the date the window runs to.
• Bank accounts, overdue invoices and overdue bills — the individual rows, each linking through to where you'd action it.
• Retentions held per job, and bonds locked with their indemnity dates.

Further down the page you'll find:

• Cash position trend and net change in cash position — a longer view of whether cash is actually growing, and where the gap between profit and cash is coming from. Both carry their own ? explainer.
• Tax summary and upcoming tax payments — the same figures as the Taxes page, from the same code, so the two can't disagree. The tax pot sits here too.
• Upcoming retention payments — scheduled releases that haven't been invoiced yet, plus anything disputed.

Estimates & quoting

Quoting is where a job's profit is won or lost. FNA Manager lets you price a quote off your own real costs, send it to the client as a PDF plus a link they can accept online, and then — once they say yes — turn it into a job in one click, so the thing you quoted and the thing you're measuring are the same thing.

Everything lives under Estimates in the main menu. The list has tabs for Open, Accepted, Rejected and Archived, and four figures across the top: the value of everything still open, how many are awaiting a reply, what you've won in the last 12 months, and your win rate (the share of decided quotes you won — quotes still sitting with a client don't count either way).

Building a quote

1. Go to Estimates and click New Estimate.
2. Fill in the job details: client (pick one, or add a new one and we'll create it in Xero too), job name, address, scope of work, a valid until date (defaults to 30 days out) and your terms.
3. Click Add a line. One searchable list covers everything you can price from:
   • Labour — your staff groups, at their rate
   • Plant & equipment — your machines, at their rate
   • Catalog — your saved prices (see below)
   • Blank line — anything that isn't saved yet
4. Set the quantity and unit on each line. Units are filtered to suit the line type — hours and days for labour and plant; each, sheet, lineal metre, m², m³, kg, tonne, litre and so on for materials; lump sum, allowance and provisional sum for everything else.
5. Click Save. GST is added at 15% on top of the subtotal.

An estimate is numbered automatically — EST-1, EST-2 and so on. You can change where the sequence starts under Settings → General.

Cost, margin and charge

Every line has three linked figures, and this is the part that earns its keep:

• Cost — what it costs you. Internal, never shown to the client.
• Margin % — markup on cost. At 15%, something that costs you $100 is quoted at $115.
• Charge — what the client pays.

Change any one of them and exactly one other moves. Correct a cost and the charge is recalculated at your margin; type a charge directly and the margin gives way, because that's a deliberate override. A line left without a cost is treated as not costed — it isn't counted as free, it's simply left out of the margin figures, and the form tells you how many of your lines that applies to.

Three cards under the lines update live as you price: Cost, Margin (in dollars) and Markup (as a percentage). If the job would lose money they turn red. Set the fallback under Settings → General → Default margin % — that's what a line reaches for when a cost is added and there's nothing more specific to go on.

Your price catalog

The catalog is your price book — saved materials and other items, each with a description, unit, cost, margin and charge. Reach it from Catalog on the Estimates page.

You rarely need to fill it in by hand. When you save an estimate containing material or "other" lines that aren't in the catalog — or that differ from what's saved — we ask whether you'd like to add or update them. Answer once and your next quote starts from today's prices. The estimate keeps whatever you priced it at either way; the prompt only affects what future quotes start from.

The catalog list shows how many times each item has been used and when it was last used, so stale prices are easy to spot. Items can be archived and restored.

Plans, specs and photos

Save the estimate first, then open it and use the Attachments tab. Drag files in or click to choose them — PDFs, images, Word and Excel, up to 10MB each and 10 files per estimate (the limit matches what Xero will accept on one quote).

Every file starts as Internal only. That matters: a supplier's quote or a marked-up takeoff is your buy price with a filename on it. Switch a file to Client can see this when you want it on their copy, and tick attach to the email if it should ride along with the quote rather than just sit on the online page.

Files aren't copied when you duplicate an estimate — deliberately, so a superseded drawing can't follow a new quote out the door. Attach them to the copy if you need them.

Sending it to the client

1. Open the estimate and click Send.
2. Check the email address. If the client has no email in Xero, you can save the one you type back to them.
3. Add a note if you'd like — it goes in the body of the email above the numbers.
4. Click Send it.

They receive the estimate as a PDF, the attachments you marked to send with the email, and a link to a page where they can accept or decline online — no login, no account. Any other client-visible file is available on that page. Your company logo appears on all of it (upload one under Settings → General).

A few things worth knowing:

• A sent estimate stays editable, but the client keeps seeing the version you emailed. If you change it afterwards, the estimate is flagged Edited since sent and you'll be told the client is still looking at the old one. Send it again to give them the new version.
• The link closes when the quote expires. Past the valid-until date the client can no longer accept; for a month afterwards the page still loads and tells them to get in touch for an updated quote, and after that it stops loading at all.
• You can revoke the link at any time — useful if a quote got forwarded further than you intended. Sending again mints a fresh one.
• If the valid-until date has already passed when you go to send, we offer to re-date it first so the client can actually act on it.

You can also download the PDF yourself at any time, and duplicate an estimate to re-quote at a new price — the copy gets its own number, 30 fresh days, and isn't sent to anyone.

Recording their answer

Most clients will ring you, or say yes on site. Use Mark accepted or Mark declined on the estimate and add a note about what they said. If they answered through the online link, it's recorded automatically.

Either way, every send and every decision is kept in an activity log on the estimate, in order, with the note attached to the decision it was given with. If you record the wrong answer you can change the decision, or reopen the estimate entirely so it's undecided again — the original decision stays in the log, because this adds to the history rather than erasing it. Reopening a sent quote that's still in date will re-arm the client's link, and we say so before you confirm.

Turning a quote into a job

Once a quote is accepted, a green prompt appears at the top: Create the job. Pick who's managing it (and the client, if the estimate didn't have one) and confirm.

The job is created at the accepted subtotal, excluding GST — not the current one, so an edit made after acceptance can't quietly re-price work the client already signed off. Nothing is created in your jobs list while a quote is still speculative, so a quote you never win burns no job number and leaves no tracking option behind in Xero.

From then on the job carries a contract sum instead of a typed-in price, and the job page lists the documents that make it up.

Variations

A variation is a change to work already under way, priced as its own quote for the client to approve. Unapproved variations are the commonest way a trade business loses money it has already spent, so this is the part worth using.

On any job that came from a quote, click Variation in the header. It starts as a draft estimate attached to that job — you price it, send it and get a decision exactly like any other estimate. Nothing is sent and nothing changes the contract sum until the client accepts.

When they do accept, the variation's value is added to the job's contract sum. It doesn't create a second job. If the job has a retention policy, the retention cap moves with the contract sum, and we tell you so at the moment it happens rather than leaving you to find it at reconciliation.

Variations raised but not yet answered are shown beside the contract sum as Awaiting approval, deliberately outside it — being $8,000 over with $6,000 sitting with the client is a completely different situation from being over with nothing asked for.

You can also raise a variation pre-filled from what's actually happened: open the quoted-vs-used breakdown on a job's Staff or Plant panel and raise a variation for the overrun, or for a trade that was never quoted at all. That's two clicks from noticing the problem to having a priced variation in front of the client, while the job is still running.

Copying a quote to Xero

If you'd like the quote to exist in Xero as well, click Copy to Xero on the estimate. It creates a Xero quote with the same lines and attachments, and the button becomes In Xero so you can jump straight to it. This is optional — FNA Manager doesn't need it, and nothing in job costing depends on it.

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

Most jobs should start life as an estimate — quote it, win it, convert it. To create one directly:

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 (we'll add it to Xero too).
   • Job name, address, description — for your own reference.
   • Price — what the job should bring in, excluding GST. Used later to compare against actuals.
4. Set a retention policy if the customer withholds retention on this job.
5. Optionally link a Xero tracking category — this is the easiest way to pull historical and future invoices against it automatically.
6. Click Save.

Jobs start in the Active tab. Change the status on the job's edit page to Completed and it moves to the Completed tab; Hold and Cancelled are also available and stay on the active list.

A job created from an accepted quote carries a contract sum rather than a price you type, and that figure is the original quote plus every accepted variation. It isn't editable by hand, because it's the total of documents a client actually agreed to.

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.

Short cut: if you just need the two categories created, FNA Manager can do it for you — see the setup wizard, or Settings → Xero if you've already been through it. The steps below are the manual route, and are what you want if you're adding an option per job.

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 (in the menu under your business name, top right) and open the Xero tab.
2. Under Job tracking category, pick the Xero category you just set up.
3. If you use a second tracking category for vehicles or equipment, set it under Plant & equipment tracking category.
4. Click Save.

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.

There's also an Auto-link tracking options by name setting on the same page (on by default). When an invoice arrives carrying a tracking option whose name exactly matches one of your jobs or pieces of equipment, we link the two for you. Renaming either side stops future auto-links; anything already linked stays linked.

Renaming an option in Xero doesn't break your history. We match on Xero's underlying option ID, not the name, so a job stays linked to its invoices through a rename. The importer flags renamed and archived options so you can see what's happened.

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. Tick the line items you want to allocate.
4. Choose what to allocate them 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)
5. Pick the specific job, machine or person, and click Assign.

You can repeat this for different lines on the same invoice — a single bill can be split across several jobs. 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 and click Import.
2. Pick the tracking category and option to match.
3. Toggle Live import on if you want future invoices tagged the same way to also flow in automatically.
4. Click Import. FNA Manager processes it in the background — invoices appear on the job within a minute or two.

Live imports are listed underneath, each with its status: renamed in Xero (still matched, we just show the new name), no longer in Xero (existing matches kept, nothing new will be coded) or needs re-link (re-select the option to repair it). Click Stop to end an import; invoices that only came in through that rule are unattached from the job. They stay in Xero, of course.

Reading job profitability

On the jobs list, every job shows:

• Quoted — the contract sum (or the price you typed, on a job with no quote).
• Revenue — customer invoices allocated to the job, net of credit notes and excluding GST. Retention held back is excluded until it's released.
• Expenses — bills allocated 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.

The cards above the table give the same totals across every job on the tab, and a date-range picker lets you narrow everything to a period. Click any column heading to sort, or search by date, job ID, client or name.

Click through to a job for the full breakdown: every invoice and bill line, timesheet entries by week, equipment hours, bonds, the retentions panel, and — for a job that came from a quote — the list of documents that make up the contract sum, each linking back to the estimate it came from.

Quoted vs used

On a job that came from a quote, the Staff and Plant & Equipment panels each carry a bar showing how much of the quoted labour or plant has been used so far. Hover it (or open the breakdown) to see the dollars behind the percentage and which staff group or machine the difference sits in.

Two things make this trustworthy. The baseline is the contract — the original quote plus every accepted variation — so properly varying a job doesn't make it look like an overrun. And both sides are measured as cost, from the same internal rate, so the bar never manufactures an overrun equal to your margin.

One caveat, and it's an important one: FNA Manager has no percent-complete, so a consumption bar isn't a verdict on its own. 85% of the quoted labour is brilliant on a nearly-finished job and alarming on one that started last week — which is why the panel shows what you've billed alongside what you've used. The gap between those two is the misquote signal. Anything already sitting on an unapproved variation is called out under the bar. The comparison is hidden while a date range is applied, because a quote has no dates to filter by.

The By account tab

The second tab on a job breaks its revenue and costs down by chart-of-accounts code, paired up using your groupings — so you can see, for one job, whether the dayworks income covered the dayworks cost. You can summarise by date or by any of your Xero tracking categories, and where the job was quoted, each account shows quoted against used.

Exporting a job

From the job detail page, click Export to download the full breakdown as an Excel spreadsheet. Useful for handing to your accountant, your client, or a project manager.

Revenue & expenses

Revenue (invoices)

Under Finances → Revenue you'll find every authorised customer invoice from Xero. Search by date, contact, invoice number or total. Each row shows:

• Due date, with an Overdue or Paid badge
• Contact name and invoice number
• Total excluding GST, and the amount still owing including GST
• 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, or the arrow icon to open it in Xero. 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 machine's running total.

Putting an invoice on hold

Sometimes you want to flag an invoice as under question — for example, if there's a dispute with the customer. Open the invoice's assign page and click Hold invoice, then record the reason.

The invoice is marked with an on hold badge — including in the overdue lists on your dashboard, with your reason on hover — so you and your team can see at a glance that it needs attention rather than chasing. Click Resolve on the invoice to lift the hold. It stays in Xero and in FNA Manager exactly as before; the hold is a note for your own tracking.

Taxes

The Finances → Taxes page answers one question: what do I owe the IRD, and have I got it? You don't type your tax obligations in — they're worked out from your Xero data, and payments are detected from your bank.

How the numbers are worked out

Three cards sit at the top, all scoped to your current financial year so they always reconcile:

• Owed — tax charged for this financial year.
• Paid — what's been paid against it.
• Still to pay — owed minus paid (minus anything written off). If it's negative, you're owed a refund and it says so.

Underneath, a table breaks the same figures down by tax type — GST, PAYE, FBT, RWT and provisional. Each obligation comes from a different source:

• GST — from your filed Xero GST returns, plus an estimate for the period that's still running.
• PAYE — derived from your Xero pay runs.
• FBT and RWT — read from the accrued balance on the Xero account you've mapped, anchored to your filing frequency.
• Provisional — from your instalment schedule (see below).

Anything not yet firm is badged Estimated, and there's a ? next to Still to pay explaining why a figure might still move. The commonest case is worth understanding: a GST period that has just closed shows nearly all the GST you owe against only part of the GST you're owed back, because supplier bills keep arriving for weeks afterwards. That figure starts high and falls as bills land, and we tell you when only a fraction of a typical month's bills are in.

Alerts at the top of the page flag what needs your attention, worst first: overdue obligations (aggregated into one line rather than a wall of rows), taxes with no mapped account, PAYE we couldn't calculate, and payments that were detected but couldn't be matched to anything.

A tax with nothing mapped shows not tracked rather than a confident $0 — "we aren't following this" and "you owe nothing" are very different answers.

Mapping your tax accounts

Under Settings → Tax → Tax accounts, map each tax to the Xero account that holds its balance. GST is detected for you; please confirm the rest. Search each field by account number or name.

This mapping is what lets FNA Manager read what's owed and — just as importantly — spot the payments going out. Every night we scan bank payments coded to those accounts and attribute them to the obligation they settle.

By default only payments made to “Inland Revenue” are counted. If you settle tax under a related or group entity whose name appears on the bank payment instead, add that exact contact name under Settings → Tax → Additional payees.

The tax pot

The tax pot answers the question the cards above it raise: can I actually pay that? It shows how much you should have set aside against how much you have, with a traffic light — green once the pot covers what's needed, amber from 70%, red below.

The balance comes from one of two places. If you keep tax money in its own bank account, pick it under Settings → Tax and we'll read its balance from Xero each night, always shown with the date it was true. Otherwise, type in what you've set aside and update it when it changes.

The pot appears on both the dashboard and the Taxes page. If your business doesn't run a separate tax pot, switch it off in Settings — that only hides the display, nothing stops being tracked.

Provisional tax

Set your method under Settings → Tax. Most NZ construction businesses use Standard:

• Standard — last year's residual income tax plus the IRD's uplift (5% if last year's return was filed on time, 10% if not), split across your instalments.
• Estimation — you tell us your forecast for this year's residual income tax and we divide it across the instalments. Under-estimate and IRD charges use-of-money interest on the shortfall.
• Ratio and AIM — Xero owns those calculations, so we signpost rather than duplicate them.

Enter last year's residual income tax from your filed IR4 if you have it. It's the accurate basis for the standard method — without it we fall back to roughly 28% of last year's net profit, which can be well off once your accounts include tax adjustments. We'll nudge you when the figure you saved is for an older financial year.

Also tell us whether you have a tax agent (terminal tax due 7 April rather than 7 February). The Schedule button on the provisional row shows every instalment, its date, its amount and whether it's paid, upcoming or overdue.

Reconciliation & write-offs

Click Reconciliation on any tax type's row to line its obligations up against the bank payments we actually detected. For each period you see what was owed, what was detected as paid, what's been written off and what remains — and you can widen it to every tax type from there.

It also surfaces unattributed payments — money that left the bank against a mapped tax account but didn't match any obligation. That's usually a mis-coded payment, and it's the sort of thing that's invisible until you go looking. Payments dated before we started tracking a tax type are marked pre-tracking and need no action.

Where a balance is never going to arrive as a payment — a mis-coding remainder, an IRD offset, rounding — click Write-off and record it with a reason. Write-offs are audited and reversible; nothing is deleted.

Detection re-runs every night, so if you re-code something in Xero it heals itself the next morning.

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 and open the Xero tab.
2. 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 Save.

Repeat for each pair you want to compare. You can delete a grouping anytime if it's no longer useful. Groupings drive the By account tab on every job.

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.

The list (Admin → Plant & Equipment) splits into Plant, Equipment, Gear and Decommissioned, with cards across the top for hire purchase due this month, monthly lease commitments and the total value of everything you own. Each tab also shows pool-level figures — average actual cost per hour, utilisation and total value — so you can see how a whole class of gear is performing at a glance.

Adding equipment

1. Go to Admin → Plant & Equipment and click New.
2. Optionally pick a Xero fixed asset to create it from — the name, purchase date, cost and depreciation settings come across with it.
3. Fill in:
   • Type — Heavy machinery, Light vehicle, Equipment or Gear.
   • Name and identifier — rego plate, serial or fleet number, whatever you use day-to-day.
   • Assigned to — the employee it lives with. This is who gets the compliance reminders.
   • Purchase date and purchase price — used for depreciation and cost-per-hour.
   • Equipment group — see below.
   • Mileage and notes — for vehicles and anything else you need handy.
4. Set the two charge-out rates and, if you want cost-per-hour to be accurate, its depreciation.
5. If it's on a hire purchase or lease, complete the finance section (see below).
6. Add the WoF, test & tag and maintenance dates.
7. Optionally link a Xero tracking-category option — future fuel, repair and maintenance bills tagged in Xero will automatically flow to this machine.
8. Click Save.

Equipment groups

Group related items together (e.g. "Vehicles", "Compactors", "Tools") and set default charge-out rates for the group, so a new machine inherits sensible rates instead of starting at zero. Manage them from the Groups button on the equipment page.

The two charge-out rates

Every machine (and every equipment group) carries two rates, and the distinction matters:

• Internal charge-out rate — what an hour of this machine costs the business. It's what timesheets are costed at, and what an estimate treats as a plant line's cost. Leave it blank and we fall back to the machine's average actual cost.
• Client charge-out rate — what a client is quoted per hour. Leave it blank and estimates price the line from cost plus your default margin.

Keeping them apart is what lets a job compare quoted cost against actual cost honestly. If you set only one, set the internal rate.

Depreciation

Depreciation is the biggest single component of what a machine costs per hour, so it's worth setting. Pick an asset type preset and we'll fill in IRD-style rates for you — excavators and bulldozers, motor vehicles, breakers, chainsaws, concrete mixers and cherry pickers, computers, compactors, scaffolding and generators — or set the method and rate yourself.

Methods are diminishing value, straight line, full depreciation or none. If the equipment came from a Xero fixed asset, we use Xero's own settings. Failing everything else, we assume straight line over five years so cost-per-hour is never simply wrong by the whole purchase price.

The equipment page shows a year-by-year schedule with the current year highlighted, so you can see what the machine is worth on paper today.

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: open the equipment item, fill in the date under WoF/CoF next due, Test & tag next due or Next maintenance date, and save.

What you'll get: three reminder emails per date — one month before, one week before, and on the day itself.

Who gets the email: the staff member assigned to that piece of equipment (the Assigned to field). 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.

AAC and utilisation — what they mean

Average actual cost (AAC) is what a machine costs you per hour of use. It's calculated as:

(depreciation for the period + every supplier bill you've allocated to that machine) ÷ hours worked in that period.

The period is how far back we can honestly measure, capped at twelve months. That starts from whichever came first: the day you joined, or your earliest timesheet. So for a business that joined six months ago it's six months — not a year padded out with months we had no hours for.

So fuel, repairs, insurance, registration and parts all land in it, as long as you've assigned those bills to the machine. For equipment you've owned less than a year we pad the hours sensibly so a brand-new machine doesn't show an absurd hourly cost.

Compare AAC against what you charge clients for using that machine. If your client rate is lower than your AAC, you're losing money every time it runs.

Utilisation is hours worked as a percentage of every hour in the period — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That's a deliberately hard yardstick: it's a measure of how much of a machine's existence is earning, not how full its working week is. Low utilisation on an expensive machine is a warning sign. High utilisation on a cheap one might justify an upgrade.

Both figures are recalculated nightly, and both depend on timesheets being entered — a machine with no logged hours shows "no usage data yet" rather than a made-up number.

Sell, hire or replace? — the lifecycle panel

AAC and utilisation tell you where a machine stands today. The Lifecycle panel on each equipment page shows the trend: month by month, what it earned against what it cost, and whether it has paid for itself yet. It's built entirely from records you already keep, so there's nothing extra to enter.

Where the numbers come from

• Charged to jobs — its hours multiplied by the internal charge-out rate recorded on each timesheet at the time. Putting your rates up doesn't rewrite last year's history.
• Invoiced out — customer invoices tracked to that machine in Xero, net of GST. Dry hire, mostly.
• Running costs — supplier bills allocated to it, net of GST and after credit notes: repairs, but also fuel, insurance and anything else you've coded to it.
• Depreciation & finance — the yearly write-down split across the months, plus hire-purchase interest across the term. A leased machine doesn't depreciate: its lease payments are the cost of having it.

Hire-purchase instalments aren't charged against the machine, only the interest. The instalments buy an asset that depreciation is already expensing — counting both would charge you for the same machine twice.

Paid for itself

The line running across the chart is everything the machine has earned since you got it, less running costs and finance — but not depreciation, because depreciation is the purchase price being written off gradually. When that line crosses the dashed "what it cost" marker, it has paid for itself, and the panel names the month. The Net position figure above the chart is the stricter test: earnings less every cost including depreciation.

The verdict

Above the chart, FNA Manager gives you a call on the machine, with the numbers behind it:

• Earning its keep — used enough, earning more than it costs.
• Worth watching — one warning sign; worth knowing, not yet a decision.
• Time to replace — you use it a lot, but repairs, age or running costs have overtaken what it brings in. You still need one, so replace it.
• Consider selling and hiring — the same problems, or simply too little use to justify owning it. Since you don't use it much, buying another would repeat the mistake.
• Consider buying one — leased machines only. See below.
• Consider returning the lease — leased machines only. You can't sell a lease or replace a leased machine, so both of those exits collapse into the one you can actually take.
• Not enough data yet — fewer than three of the last twelve months have hours or costs against it. We'd rather say nothing than guess about a machine.

Whether it says replace or sell comes down to how much you actually use it. The problem may be identical; what you should do next isn't. Being idle on its own is never enough to suggest selling — a machine you use one week a year that pays for itself in that week is doing its job.

The signals behind the verdict: running costs reaching 50% of what it earned (serious at 80%), the last six months of costs running more than half again the six before, its cost per hour passing its charge-out rate, book value down to 10% of cost while still costing money, and utilisation under 10% — the same "used rarely" threshold as the utilisation tile.

Owning vs hiring

Set a market hire rate on a machine (or on its group, so a whole fleet inherits it) and the panel puts the two side by side: what owning it cost you over the last twelve months, against what hiring one for the hours you actually used would have cost. That's the number that settles a sell-and-hire argument. Bear in mind a hire rate doesn't include getting the machine to site or having it there the day you need it.

Setting a charge-out rate matters too: without one there's nothing to measure the machine's running cost against, and the panel will tell you so rather than guess.

Leased machines: the opposite question

For something you own, the question is whether to keep it. For a lease it inverts — there's no capital sunk and nothing to write down, so heavy use is the problem: the payments are buying the machine for the leasing company. Enter a price to buy an equivalent on a leased item (and, beside it, the useful life you'd expect to get) and the comparison can price owning it:

• Year against year — the last twelve months of lease payments against the purchase price spread over its useful life. Owning has to win by a clear margin before we say anything, because a lease carries things owning doesn't: no capital tied up, no residual risk, and on a maintained lease the servicing isn't yours.

Once the payments you've made add up to more than the machine costs to buy, the panel says so outright — no assumptions in that one, and it's usually what decides it.

A lease has to be genuinely well used before we'd suggest buying — one you barely touch should go back, not be bought, and that's what Consider returning the lease means. The same verdict covers a leased machine whose repairs have overtaken it: you hand it back rather than replacing it.

Across the whole fleet

Verdicts are recalculated nightly, so the Plant & equipment list shows a badge on any machine needing a decision, and a summary at the top telling you how many there are — you don't have to open every item to find the two that matter. Decommissioned items are left out; they've already gone.

Hire purchase and leases

When you add equipment financed on HP or a lease, tick the relevant box and enter:

• Deposit (HP)
• Frequency — weekly, fortnightly or monthly
• Payment amount
• Number of payments remaining

FNA Manager counts each scheduled payment in your projected outgoings, so your dashboard shows the real cashflow impact of your fleet. The equipment page totals what's due this month across every HP agreement and what your leases cost per month, each with a breakdown you can click into.

Decommissioning

When you sell or retire a machine, open it and click Decommission. It moves to the Decommissioned tab rather than disappearing: it drops off your Plant, Equipment and Gear lists and can't be picked on new timesheets, but every cost already recorded against a job is kept, so past job costing still adds up. Open it again and click Return to service to put it back.

Export the whole list, decommissioned items included, as an Excel spreadsheet from the Export button.

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, along with their wage history, job title and start date. To add or remove a staff member, do it in Xero and they'll sync across — there's a Manage staff in Xero button on the page that takes you straight there. Xero's guide: adding a permanent employee (NZ).

What you set here is the costing side: which group they're in and their charge-out rate.

Staff groups (L1 to L4)

New accounts come with four default groups:

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

Each group carries two default rates, the same split as plant: an internal charge (what an hour of that person's time costs the business, used to cost timesheets and estimate labour lines) and a client charge-out rate (what you quote). An individual staff member can override the internal rate; leave it blank and they inherit the group's, and failing that their own average actual cost.

Grouping your team also lets FNA Manager show pool-level cost and utilisation per group. You can rename the defaults, create your own (e.g. "Apprentices", "Subbies"), or leave everyone ungrouped. Manage them from Groups on the staff page.

Staff cost and utilisation

For each staff member, FNA Manager shows:

• Average actual cost — their real cost per hour worked over the last twelve months: (timesheet cost + every supplier bill you've allocated to them) ÷ hours worked. So tools, training and PPE land in it if you've assigned those bills to them. With no recorded hours we fall back to their current Xero wage.
• Charge-out rate — the internal rate used when they're allocated to jobs, inherited from their group unless overridden.
• Utilisation — hours worked as a percentage of every hour in the period (24 × 7). A full-time employee working a 40-hour week sits at around 24%, so read it as a relative measure between people rather than a target to hit.
• Wage history, start date and last pay rise, straight from Xero.

Their page also lists the bills assigned to them, their recent timesheets, the equipment they're responsible for, and the jobs they manage.

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, average actual cost and utilisation. You need at least one job created before you can enter a timesheet.

Entering a timesheet

1. Go to Admin → Timesheets. Staff and plant have their own tabs, and rows are badged Overdue when the last timesheet is more than a week (amber) or two weeks (red) behind.
2. Find the person or machine and click New.
3. Pick the week ending date from the dropdown — only weeks without an entry are shown, so you can't double up.
4. For each job they worked on, add a row and enter hours day by day, Monday to Sunday. On staff timesheets each row also carries a Xero earnings rate, a chart-of-account code and an optional note.
5. Click Save.

If you accidentally add the same job twice, an inline warning appears before you can save. The rate used comes from the person's or machine's own internal rate, falling back to their group's default — you adjust it on the staff member, equipment item or group, not on the timesheet itself. Entries are stored per week, per job, per person or machine, with the rate baked in, 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, so you can attribute its time to the same jobs in one pass — and we show you where that machine's hours have already been logged by someone else that week, so two people don't book the same digger twice.

Pushing to Xero Payroll

Whether saving a timesheet here also creates it in Xero Payroll is a setting, not a per-save choice. Turn on Push timesheets to Xero Payroll under Settings → Xero. It's off by default, which keeps timesheets in FNA Manager only.

With it on:

• Only employee timesheets are pushed — plant and equipment hours have no payroll equivalent and stay here.
• An employee needs a Xero employee link and a payroll calendar. Anyone missing those still saves fine; the timesheet just stays in FNA Manager, and the form warns you before you save.
• Each line needs a valid Xero earnings rate. That one does stop the save, because it's fixable on the form in front of you.

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 is taken from it.
4. Enter the indemnity date, amount and any notes.
5. Click Save. New bonds start as active. Edit a bond to change its status — pending if it isn't lodged yet, or released once it's been returned.

Every active or pending bond is totalled on the dashboard's Bonds card, which opens a list of them with their indemnity dates, and each bond is also shown on the job it belongs to — so money tied up in bonds is never out of sight.

How retentions work

Retention is the slice of every progress claim your customer holds back until the job reaches practical completion and the defects liability period (DLP) has run. You've earned the money and invoiced for the work, but you can't collect that portion yet. Retentions in FNA Manager are built to answer two questions you otherwise lose track of: how much is being held off me right now, and when do I get it back?

You don't hand-type a retention or its total. Instead you set a retention policy on the job once, and FNA Manager works out how much has been retained automatically as your invoices sync from Xero. The flow is:

1. Set a retention policy on the job — rate, cap and release pattern.
2. As your customer invoices for that job sync from Xero, retention accrues automatically into a running ledger, capped at the limit you set.
3. When the job reaches practical completion, you build a release schedule and invoice the held amounts back out — straight into Xero.

Held amounts show up across the app: as a Retentions card on your dashboard, as a panel on each job, and on the Admin → Retentions page. The ledger behind the scenes is always the source of truth, so the held figure reconciles everywhere.

Setting a job's retention policy

The policy lives on the job, because retention rules vary contract to contract. You'll find it on the job create and edit forms, in the Retention policy section.

1. Open the job (or create one) and tick This job has a retention.
2. Fill in the policy:
   • Retention rate (%) — the percentage withheld from each progress claim. 10% is the common NZ figure.
   • Cap (% of contract) — the maximum total retention as a percentage of the contract price. 5% is typical. Once the cap is reached, no further retention accrues. On a job built from quotes, the cap moves with the contract sum as variations are accepted.
   • Release pattern — how the held money is scheduled to come back: 50% on practical completion, 50% at end of DLP; 100% on practical completion; 100% at end of DLP; or Custom schedule if you want to build the dates by hand.
   • Defects liability period (months) — how long after practical completion the final release is due. Defaults to 12.
   • Practical completion date — leave this blank until PC is actually reached. Setting it starts the release clock and unlocks the "build release schedule" step.
   • Retention account — optional. The Xero account code that release invoices for this job should post to. Leave it on the default to inherit your tenant-wide retention release account.
3. Save the job. From now on, retention accrues automatically.

Watching retention build up

Once a policy is set, every customer invoice that syncs for the job has its retention portion calculated and added to a running ledger — capped at the limit. You don't lift a finger. Each job's page carries a Retentions panel showing:

• Currently held — the live retained balance, and how it sits against the cap.
• Released — how much has been invoiced back out so far.
• Next release — the amount and date of the next scheduled release, once a schedule exists.
• Retention account activity — every invoice line that added to or released from the balance, so you can audit how the figure was reached.

The Admin → Retentions page lists every job that's holding retention. Any job with an accrued balance but no release schedule yet is flagged Untracked, with a one-click Create schedule button — you don't need a retention rate policy set for this, just a held balance and a completion date. The footer reconciles everything: tracked (scheduled) + untracked (held) = total held across the business, matching the dashboard card exactly.

You may also see an Under-scheduled or Over-scheduled badge on a retention. That just means later progress claims have moved the held balance away from what the release schedule currently plans for — top up or trim the schedule to match. The ledger stays correct either way.

Releasing retention

When the job hits practical completion, the job's Retentions panel (and the Retentions list) offers Build release schedule, which creates a schedule from your held balance. If you've set a Practical completion date and a release pattern on the job policy, the schedule is pre-filled from them; if not, the panel simply asks for a completion date and gives you an empty schedule to fill in by hand — so you can release retention even on jobs that were only ever tracked through your retention account code, with no rate policy.

Open the retention to fine-tune and action the schedule. Each row is one scheduled release with a due date, amount, and free-text terms (e.g. "50% on practical completion", "50% 12 months after PC"). For each row you can:

• Link a Xero invoice — if you've already raised the release invoice in Xero, attach it from the picker (it lists your customer invoices for that client that aren't already linked elsewhere).
• Generate in Xero — FNA Manager creates a draft release invoice in Xero for that amount and opens it in a new tab for you to review and approve. It's coded to your retention account and tagged with the job's tracking, and GST is added on top (retention is held GST-exclusive, so the GST on that slice falls due now). You finalise it in Xero. If you've written any retention off, the release is automatically reduced by it — the invoice is raised for the net amount and carries a note explaining what was written off and why.
• Mark it invoiced manually if you handled it outside the app.

The amounts on the schedule must add up to the retention total before you can save (there's a Left to assign figure to guide you). As each entry is invoiced, it's recorded as a release on the ledger and the held balance drops. Once every entry has been invoiced, the retention moves itself to Complete and drops off the active list.

The status sits at the top of the retention: Active while money is still held, Disputed if you need to flag a hold-up (you set this by hand), and Complete once it's all been released.

Write-offs & disputes

Sometimes you won't collect the full retention — the customer short-pays for a genuine defect, a back-charge, or a set-off, or in the worst case it's simply never coming back. On the retention edit page, click Record write-off / claim, enter the amount, a reason, and the date. This writes a negative adjustment against the ledger and reduces what the job shows as held, without touching Xero (your bookkeeper reconciles the short payment at bank rec). If the write-off clears the whole balance, the retention closes itself out.

The write-off then flows through automatically:

• It reduces the next payment due. Say $200 is scheduled for next month and you write off $10 — the schedule now shows that release as $10 written off, invoicing $190. When you generate the release invoice, it's raised in Xero for the net $190 with a note recording the write-off and your reason. A write-off larger than the next release spills onto later ones, earliest first.
• It's visible everywhere. The written-off figure shows on the job's Retentions panel, in the footer of the Admin → Retentions page, and as an "incl. … written off" line under the dashboard Retentions card — so the lower held total is always explained rather than just quietly smaller.
• It can be reversed. If you wrote off too much, mis-typed it, or the customer pays after all, click Reverse write-off, enter the amount (up to what's been written off) and a reason. That reinstates the held balance, and if the retention had already closed, it re-opens.

Retentions are never deleted — the ledger is your audit trail. Corrections are always made as write-offs, reversals, or releases (never by editing or deleting history), so the record of what was held, written off, and released stays intact.

Retention release account

So that generated release invoices post to the right place in Xero, set a default account once under Settings → Xero → Retention release account. Pick the Xero account code your retentions should land on — typically a "Retentions Receivable" current asset, though a sales/revenue account works too. Any individual job can override this from its retention policy. If neither is set, a generated invoice stays as a draft with no account code for you to code by hand in Xero.

Changing this account is a significant move, so we ask you to confirm it. When you do, we re-scan your customer invoices and re-detect retention against the new code — leaving alone any job that already has release invoices or manual adjustments, so nothing you've actioned is disturbed.

Contacts

Clients & suppliers

Admin → Clients / Suppliers lists every contact synced from Xero, on two tabs — customers and suppliers — with their email, phone and address. Search or sort either list by any column.

It's a reference view: to rename or remove a contact, do it in Xero and it'll sync across. There's a Manage contacts in Xero button at the top right that takes you straight to the right screen in your Xero organisation.

You can add a new client without leaving FNA Manager: the client field on a job or an estimate lets you type a new name, and we create the contact in Xero for you. Xero's guides: add a contact · edit a contact.

Settings

Open the menu under your business name in the top-right of any page and choose Settings. It's split into three tabs: General, Tax and Xero.

General

Three sub-tabs, each saved on its own — changing your next job number doesn't touch your overdraft.

Finances

• Day of the month your invoices are due — your usual payment terms (e.g. the 20th of the month following invoice). Used to place unpaid invoices on the liquidity chart.
• Overdraft — your bank's overdraft cap. Drawn on the dashboard chart so you can see how close you're flying to it.
• Buffer — the amount you like to keep on top of zero as a safety margin. Also drawn on the chart, so a projected breach is obvious.
• Extra monthly operating spend — recurring overheads not already captured as bills in Xero (card spend, direct debits, drawings). Added to your projected operating expenses.
• Monthly operating overheads — read-only, calculated from last month's Xero P&L with wages and tax stripped out. Wages and tax are projected separately so nothing is double-counted.

Jobs

• Next job number — what's suggested for the next job you create. Change it to jump to a different series.

Estimates

• Next estimate number — the same for quotes. If that number is already used, the next free one is taken instead.
• Default margin % — markup on cost, used when you add a cost to an estimate line that didn't have one, and to price staff and plant that have no client rate of their own.
• Your company logo — see below. It lives on this tab because estimates are the only place it appears.

Your company logo

Under General → Estimates. Upload a logo (PNG, JPG or WebP, up to 2MB) and it appears on your estimate PDFs, the emails your clients receive and the online estimate page they accept from. Uploading a new one replaces it everywhere, including on estimates you've already sent. Without a logo, estimates show your business name.

Tax

Three sub-tabs, all covered under Taxes above: Tax settings (financial year end, GST basis and cycle, FBT and RWT filing frequencies, provisional tax method, last year's residual income tax, tax agent, and the tax pot), Tax accounts (mapping each tax to its Xero account) and Additional payees (names other than "Inland Revenue" that your tax payments go out under).

Xero

• Chart of account groupings — pair income and cost accounts. See Chart of accounts.
• Job tracking category and Plant & equipment tracking category — the two Xero categories you code invoices with. See tracking categories.
• Auto-link tracking options by name — link invoices automatically when a tracking option's name matches a job or machine exactly.
• Push timesheets to Xero Payroll — see pushing to Xero Payroll.
• Retention release account — see retention release account.

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 account 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 menu 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.