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 on your payroll are added in Xero Payroll — anyone your payroll doesn't pay, like a director or a contractor, can be added in FNA Manager instead (see staff who aren't on your payroll). Clients are the other 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 overdraft facility, cash buffer, regular payments that aren'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 → Finance; your next job number is 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 — your actual monthly low tide against the low tide you'd have had if every invoice and bill had been settled on its due date, so the band between them shows what late settlement cost you. Plus how each month's work pays for the next: what each payday brought in, what went straight to that month's suppliers, what was left to run the following month and what that month cost, with your bank balance the day before each payday. 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, keep a record of exactly what went out, 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 Work → Estimates. 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 Work → 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
   • Catalogue — 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 catalogue

The catalogue is your price book — saved materials and other items, each with a description, unit, cost, margin and charge. Reach it from Catalogue 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 catalogue — 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 catalogue 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 it belongs with the quote: client-visible files are kept with the copy we save each time you mark the quote sent, and go across if you copy the quote to Xero. Internal files never do. You email the files yourself along with the PDF — see below.

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

FNA Manager doesn't email quotes for you at the moment. You send the quote from your own email, the way you'd send anything else, and then tell FNA Manager you've sent it.

1. Open the estimate and click PDF to download it.
2. Email it to your client, with any plans or photos you want them to have.
3. Back on the estimate, click Mark as sent (next to the status), pick the date you sent it, and confirm.

The estimate moves to Sent, and we keep a copy of it exactly as it was at that moment. Every send is listed in the activity log on the estimate, and View as sent opens that copy as a PDF — so if a client says "that's not what you quoted me", you can see precisely what they were given, even after the estimate has been edited.

A few things worth knowing:

• A sent estimate stays editable. If you change it afterwards, the estimate is flagged Edited since sent, because the client is still holding the old version. Email them the new one and click Mark as sent again. Each version keeps its own copy in the log.
• The date you pick is checked. It can't be in the future, it can't be earlier than the last time you marked it sent, and it can't be after the quote's valid-until date — a quote that had already run out when it went out isn't an offer that stood. If the date has passed, update the valid-until date first.
• Clients answer you, not us. There's no accept button on the client's side — they reply to you, and you record it (below).
• Quotes emailed from FNA Manager in the past carry a link to a read-only copy of the quote. You can still revoke that link from the activity log if a quote was forwarded further than you intended.

You can download the PDF 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 marked sent.

Recording their answer

Most clients will ring you, reply to your email, or say yes on site. Use Mark accepted or Mark declined on the estimate and add a note about what they said.

Every send and every decision is kept in the 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.

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, email it, mark it sent and record the 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 Work → Jobs.
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.

You can also give a job a Planned start and Planned finish, and book people onto it from its Schedule panel — see Scheduling.

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 (an older import linked by name only: pick the same option above and import it again to re-link it, and nothing is unattached meanwhile). Click Delete 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.

Scheduling

The schedule answers one question: who is meant to be where, and on which days. You can put people on jobs from the job itself or from a month planner of your whole crew, mark who's away, and your staff see their own schedule in the staff portal.

Everything on the schedule is in whole days — a first day and a last day, both included. There are no start times or hours, so it doesn't replace timesheets; it's the plan, and timesheets are what actually happened.

A job's planned dates

A job can carry a Planned start and a Planned finish. You'll find them on the new job form, on the job's edit page, and in the Create the job dialog when you turn an accepted quote into a job. They're optional everywhere, and the finish can't be before the start.

Planned dates are a guide, not a rule. They draw the job's bar across the top of the planner, and they're the dates a new booking on that job starts with. You can still book someone outside them — you'll just be told (see warnings).

The Schedule panel on a job

Every job page has a Schedule panel listing who's booked on that job and when. Beside the heading is a small colour swatch — the colour this job wears on the planner.

• Under the heading you'll see the planned dates (for example Planned 6 – 24 Oct 2026) or No planned dates yet., with a Set dates or Edit dates link to the job's edit page.
• New (the + on a phone) opens a short form: Who, First day, Last day and an optional Note. The dates start as the job's planned dates, or today plus the next four days if it has none.
• Each booking shows Who, When and Note. Bookings that have already finished are shown faded.
• Click the pencil to change someone's dates or note, or the bin to take them off the job.
• Manage (the pencil on a phone) takes you to the month planner, opened at the job's planned start month (or this month if it hasn't got one).

This panel only shows people booked on this job. Leave, sick days and other time away aren't tied to a job, so they show on the planner instead.

The planner

Go to Work → Schedule to see your whole crew across one calendar month. The page opens on the current month and scrolls so today's column is in view.

• Moving between months — use the arrows beside the heading, pick a month from the month box, or click This month to come back.
• People run down the side in org-chart order — each manager followed by the people under them, indented. Anyone with a finish date comes after that, by name, and keeps their row until the month they leave. Click a name to open their staff page.
• Days run across the top. Weekends are shaded and today is highlighted.
• Jobs — the strip above the people shows each job's planned dates as a bar. Click one to open the job.

Each booking is a bar across the days it covers, labelled with the job code and name. Every job keeps the same colour from month to month, and the same colour appears on the job's own Schedule panel. A job that's on hold, completed or cancelled is shown faded with its status after the name. Time away is a grey striped bar labelled with its type. If one person has two bookings on the same days, the bars stack one above the other so nothing is hidden, and a booking that runs on into the previous or next month has a dashed end.

To pick one job out of a busy month, choose it in the All jobs box. Everything else fades back.

Adding a booking:

1. Click an empty day on someone's row. The form opens with that person and that day filled in. (Or click Add at the top, which starts from today for five days.)
2. Under What, choose Job and pick the Job — or choose Leave, Sick, Training or Other for time away.
3. Set the First day and Last day, and add a Note if it helps (up to 500 characters). The note is shown to the person in the staff portal, so write it for them — "bring the ladder", "meet at the yard".
4. Click Save.

If you've picked a job in the All jobs box first, clicking an empty day starts the booking on that job — handy for filling in one job's crew.

Changing or removing a booking: click its bar. You can change anything — person, type, job, dates, note — and click Save. To delete it, click Remove, then Yes, remove.

Moving a booking to someone else: drag the bar onto another person's row. It moves to them with the same job, dates and note. Dragging only changes the person — to change the dates, click the bar and edit them. Dragging needs a mouse; on a phone or tablet, open the booking and change Who instead.

The job list offers your active jobs. A booking can cover at most 366 days, and you can only book people who still work for you — someone whose finish date has passed can't be given new bookings.

Leave entered here is for planning only. It isn't read from or sent to Xero Payroll.

Warnings that don't stop you

Real life doesn't always fit a tidy plan, so the schedule never refuses a booking just because it looks odd. It saves it, then tells you what it noticed in the message at the top of the page, after the word Note:. You might see:

• Double-booked — for example Sam is already on Smith Rd reclad 6 – 10 Oct 2026.
• Booked over time away — Sam is on leave …, off sick …, at training … or unavailable …
• Booked past their finish date — Sam finishes on 17 Oct 2026.
• Outside the job's planned dates — This is outside Smith Rd reclad’s planned dates (…).
• A job that isn't active — Smith Rd reclad is on hold. (or completed, or cancelled)

A split week, or someone booked onto a job you've just put on hold, is often exactly what you meant. The warning is there so it's a choice, not an accident.

Printing the month

Click PDF on the planner to open the month you're looking at as a landscape A4 PDF, in a new tab, ready to print or save. It has the same people, order and colours as the screen, a key to the job colours, and a Notes list of any booking notes.

What your staff see

Staff with access to the staff portal have a Your schedule page listing the jobs they're booked on and any time they're down as away, from today onwards. It's grouped into This week, Next week and Later, with each job's address and your note. They only see the job's name and address — never prices, costs or anything else about the job.

• Their portal dashboard shows a Your schedule card with this week and next whenever they have something booked; See all opens the full page.
• Download PDF gives them the same list on an A4 page.
• When they fill in a timesheet in the portal, jobs they're scheduled on that week come first in the job list, marked scheduled. Every other job is still there.

Adding it to their phone's calendar. At the bottom of Your schedule, under Add to your calendar, they click Create my calendar link. They can then:

• tap Open in Apple Calendar on an iPhone or Mac, or
• Copy the link and add it in Google Calendar (on a computer: Other calendars → + → From URL) or Outlook (Add calendar → Subscribe from web).

Each booking appears as an all-day event, with the job's address as the location and your note as the description. The calendar includes bookings from the last 60 days as well as everything coming up. Calendar apps check for changes on their own timetable — often every few hours — so an update won't be instant.

Anyone with the link can see that person's schedule, so it's shown only to them, on that page. If they think someone else has it, Make a new link replaces it: the old link stops working straight away and calendars using it stop updating until the new one is added. Turn off stops the link altogether. The link also stops working if their portal access ends — for example once they have a finish date, or if the staff portal is switched off.

Change emails

When you add, change, move or remove someone's booking, they're emailed their updated schedule. It's one email per person, not one per change: we wait until nobody has touched their schedule for 30 minutes, and send at the next hourly run. So an afternoon of replanning becomes a single email, usually sent within about an hour and a half of your last change.

• The email, titled your schedule has changed, lists their bookings as they now stand for the next eight weeks — job name, address and note — with a See my schedule button to the portal. If nothing's left, it says so.
• Moving a booking between two people emails both of them.
• Changes that are entirely in the past — tidying up last month — don't send anything.
• The email doesn't sign them in. The button takes them to the portal, where they sign in as usual.

Someone is only emailed if they have an email address, the staff portal is switched on for your organisation and for them, they've already been sent their portal invitation, and they have no finish date (a finish date closes their portal sign-in, so there'd be nothing to click through to). The planner shows a small crossed-out envelope beside anyone who won't be emailed — hover it for the reason, such as Won't be emailed — no email address — and the add form shows the same reason under Who. Changes for someone who can't be emailed are not saved up and sent later.

Where someone is today

Each staff member's page has a Today: line under the heading — the job they're booked on (linked to the job), or on leave, off sick, at training, unavailable, or not scheduled. The Schedule link beside it opens the planner. "Today" is always the New Zealand date.

Anyone who signs in to FNA Manager with Xero can use the planner. A staff member you've given the Jobs office page can use it too.

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:

• Accumulated tax obligation — tax charged for this financial year, so far.
• Paid — what's been paid against it.
• Still to pay — owed minus paid (minus anything IRD credited). 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 → 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 & IRD credits

Click Reconciliation on any tax type's row to see how each period was settled. Every period gets its own ledger: it starts at the amount assessed, every payment and adjustment moves a running balance, and it ends at what's still to pay. If the ledger doesn't add up to the figure we show elsewhere, the period says so rather than quietly picking one — tell us if you ever see that.

You can widen it to every tax type from there.

Transfers between periods

If you overpay one period, the extra doesn't vanish — IRD holds it against what else you owe, and so do we. The ledger shows it leaving one period (transferred to 31 May 2026) and arriving in another (transferred from 31 Jul 2026), and each line links to the period on the other side so you can follow the money.

This is the usual reason a GST period looks like it doesn't add up at first glance: one payment settled two periods. A payment always shows at its full amount — the figure you'll find on your bank statement — with the transfer as its own separate line.

Transfer lines are tagged worked out, because that's what they are. We can see the overpayment; we can't see IRD's books, so we apply it to the nearest period still owing. That's normally what IRD does too, but not always — so if you're reconciling against your own records, those are the lines to check rather than take on trust. Every other line is either a real bank payment or something you told us about.

Settled without a bank payment

Not everything is settled by money leaving your account. IRD might apply a credit or an offset, remit a penalty, or move money across from another IRD account — a group company's GST account, say. None of that touches your bank, so we can't detect it, and Xero doesn't tell us either.

Click Record settlement on the tax type, say which of the two it was, and enter the date, amount and reason. For a transfer you can name where it came from. It then behaves like a payment: we place it against the nearest unpaid period and the ledger shows where it landed.

Money we couldn't match

Not matched to a period lists money that left the bank against a mapped tax account but didn't line up with 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.

You don't choose the period

When you record a credit or a transfer, we place it against the nearest unpaid period by date — exactly the way we place a bank payment — and the ledger shows you where it landed. That's deliberate: once an overpayment has already moved between periods, picking the right one by hand is close to impossible, and getting it wrong is silent. Seeing where it went is more useful than being asked to guess.

Everything recorded this way is audited and reversible — reverse one and the ledger is re-worked immediately, putting the money back on the balance. 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 Income, pick the account that revenue for that kind of work lands in (e.g. "210 — Dayworks Income").
5. For Cost, 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 (Equipment in the main menu) splits into Heavy machinery, Light vehicles, Equipment, Gear and Decommissioned, plus a tab for each equipment group you've set up, 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 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 — or, for someone you added in FNA Manager, from their staff record — so no extra setup is needed on your end. If they're on the staff portal, the email links them straight to their list of the gear they've been issued. If the equipment isn't assigned to anyone, the assigned person has left, or they don't have an email address, the reminder goes to every user on the FNA Manager account as a safety net — nothing falls through the cracks.

On the equipment list, each card shows a Maintenance badge for any of the three dates that's due within the month or already overdue. The emails stop on the due date itself, so once a date is overdue the red badge on the card is the reminder.

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. It starts no earlier than your business's records do (the day you joined, or your earliest timesheet, whichever came first), and no earlier than when the machine itself was added to FNA Manager or first had hours logged. 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 shown as average hours worked per week — the hours logged against a machine divided by the weeks we could see it working. That's the form you can act on: "42 hrs/week" tells you what the machine is doing without any arithmetic.

It covers the last 12 months, or from when you bought the machine or added it to FNA Manager if that's more recent — the tile says which. Weeks before we could see it working aren't counted against it, because nobody was recording hours yet, and a blank week isn't evidence a machine sat idle.

Underneath it, on the machine's own page, is the same figure as a percentage of a 40-hour week. So a machine working full time reads about 100%, and a machine earning well past a standard week reads above it — that's the "flat out" rating. This is what the rating ("used rarely", "regularly used", "flat out") and the lifecycle advisor are graded on. Low utilisation on an expensive machine is a warning sign. High utilisation on a cheap one might justify an upgrade.

The machine's own page works both figures out fresh each time you open it; the equipment list and group totals use a copy refreshed every night, so they can trail by a day. 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 16 hours a week, which is the same "used rarely" threshold the utilisation tile is rated on.

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 other tabs 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 Team → Staff, along with their wage history, job title and start date. To add or remove someone on your payroll, 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). People your payroll doesn't pay are added here instead — see below.

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 — average hours worked per week: the hours on their own timesheet lines divided by the weeks we could see them working. Hours you record against a machine belong to that machine, even when you name the operator, so they aren’t counted a second time here — which means someone who only ever appears as an operator, or a contractor who bills by invoice, shows No timesheet data rather than zero. Underneath it, on their own page, is the same figure as a percentage of a 40-hour week, which is what the rating is graded on — so full-time work reads about 100%, and anyone regularly past a standard week reads above it as "flat out".
• 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.

Staff who aren't on your payroll

Everyone on your Xero Payroll arrives here on their own, and Xero looks after their details. But plenty of people work for a business without being paid by it — a director paid by a parent company that charges you a management fee, or a contractor who invoices you. FNA Manager can hold them too, so they can run jobs, be someone's manager, sign off timesheets and be given the staff portal like anyone else.

There are two ways in:

• Somebody your payroll used to pay. When Xero ends their employment they drop into Decommissioned. Use Keep on — not paid through payroll on their card. They go straight back into your active staff, and from then on you look after their name, email, phone and leaving date here rather than in Xero. If your payroll ever starts paying them again, Xero takes over once more on its own.
• Somebody your payroll has never paid. Use Add someone not on payroll on the staff page. If they're later put on your Xero Payroll, FNA Manager recognises them by their email address and keeps the record you already have, with their hours and rates intact.

What it costs to have them. There's no wage for us to read, so their page has a Cost per hour field — their share of the management fee, or their contract rate. Leave it blank and we cost them the other honest way, from supplier bills you've allocated to them divided by their hours. Their charge-out rate works exactly as it does for everyone else.

Their timesheets are never sent to Xero Payroll, because there's no payroll record to send them to. They still save here and still cost your jobs.

When they finish, use Mark as left on their page — the equivalent of Xero ending an employee. Their sign-in stops working straight away, and their timesheets and job costs stay exactly as they are.

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

Hours get in two ways: you (or whoever looks after timesheets) enter a week in the office, or your staff enter their own week in the staff portal and send it to you for approval.

To enter a week in the office:

1. Go to Team → Timesheets. Staff and plant have their own tabs, Staff and Plant & Equipment, 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. It lists the last 20 weeks, leaving out any week that already has an entry, so you can't double up.
4. For each job they worked on, enter hours day by day, Monday to Sunday — use Add job for each extra job. On staff timesheets each line also carries a Pay rate (one of your Xero earnings rates), an Account from your chart of accounts and an optional Note.
5. Click Save.

A week you enter in the office is saved as Approved — entering it is the sign-off — so it counts towards your job costs straight away. Only approved hours are counted in job costs. To change a week's status later, open it (View, then Edit) and use the Status dropdown: Draft, Pending or Approved. The one exception is a staff member you've given access to the office timesheet pages entering their own week: it's saved as Pending and needs approving like any other (see Approving timesheets).

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. Hours entered in the staff portal pick up their rate when they're approved. 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.

Approving timesheets

When staff fill in their week in the staff portal, they can Save as draft or Submit for approval. Submitting sends the week for sign-off, and it shows as Pending until someone approves it or sends it back. Pending hours don't count towards job costs — only approved hours do.

Who it goes to. A submitted week goes to the person's manager — whoever they report to on the org chart — as long as that manager still works for you and is on the staff portal themselves. The staff member is told before they send it: the page says Goes to [name] for sign-off, or Goes to the office for sign-off — you don't have a manager set up in the portal. If the manager has an email address, they're emailed that the week is waiting, with a Review and approve button that opens their approvals page. Whoever it goes to, every submitted week also appears in the office under Team → Approvals, so nothing gets stuck.

Approving in the office. Go to Team → Approvals. Each person's week is its own card, listing each day's job and hours (machine hours are marked with the machine's name). Click Save — approve week to approve the whole week, or Save on a single line to approve just that line. To send a line back, click Send back and fill in Why is it being sent back? — a note is required.

Approving in the staff portal. Managers on the staff portal get an Approvals tab, shown only to people who have someone reporting to them. It lists timesheets from the people who report directly to them — not their reports' reports. Each line shows the job, account, what they did, start and finish times, break and hours, but never a pay rate. A manager can Approve or Reject each line, or, when the week has more than one line, Approve all [N] lines or Reject all [N] lines to deal with them at once. Rejecting asks What needs fixing?, and the note is required. Their portal dashboard also shows how many weeks each person has waiting, with an Approve timesheets button.

Nobody on your staff signs off their own hours. In the staff portal a manager can only approve the people who report to them, never their own week, and nobody can be made their own manager. A staff member you've given access to the office timesheet pages can't approve their own week there either: a week they enter for themselves is saved as Pending, and approving it from Team → Approvals is refused. So a manager's own week goes to their manager, and the person at the top of your chart, with no manager, goes to the office. You and anyone else who signs in with Xero can still enter and approve any week.

What sending back does. The line is marked Sent back and returns to the staff member. When they open that week in the portal they see Sent back for a change with your note, and they can fix it and submit it again. If they're on the staff portal and have an email address, they're also emailed the note with a Fix my timesheet link — and rejecting a whole week with Reject all sends one email for the week, not one per line. Approval is line by line, so you can approve some days and send others back.

Reporting lines: the org chart

Reporting lines decide whose timesheets go to whom for approval. You set them on the org chart: Team → Org chart. It shows everyone currently working for you, each under their manager, with a count along the top of people, managers and anyone unassigned — and of anything that needs attention.

Unassigned, on the right (on top on a phone), lists everyone who has no manager and nobody reporting to them. It's grouped so the people you usually place first are at the top: directors and executives, then managers, then everyone else, and within each by job title — "Labourer (VISA)" and "Labourer (casual)" sit together under Labourer. Search it by name or title.

To set someone's manager, drag their card onto the person they report to. To take them out of every line, drag them onto Drop here to remove their manager. To place several people at once, tick them (or use Select group) and drag any one of them, or press Assign selected and pick a name. On a phone or tablet, tap a card to choose their manager from a list. After each change the chart redraws with everyone in their new place, and the message at the top offers Undo. If a change would make a line loop back on itself — Sam reports to Alex, so Alex can't report to Sam — nothing is saved, and the message says who.

Until anyone has a manager, the chart says so: Nobody has a manager yet. Reporting lines decide who signs off each person's timesheets — until one is set, every week goes to the office.

The labels on each card:

• A number in the top right — how many people report to them directly.
• Not on the portal — can't approve — they have people reporting to them but aren't on the staff portal, so those people's weeks go to the office instead. Give them the staff portal to fix it.
• Manager has left or Manager archived, with the manager's name — the person they reported to has finished up or been archived. They move to the top of the chart, and their weeks go to the office until you pick a new manager.
• Reporting loop — pick a manager to break it — the reporting line runs round in a circle. Pick a new manager for them.

People in Unassigned have their weeks go to the office until they're placed. The vehicles and plant someone holds are on their own staff page.

Staff you've given the Staff access in the office can see the org chart but can't change it: the cards can't be dragged, tapped or ticked.

Getting hours into Xero Payroll

Nothing is sent to Xero Payroll when a timesheet is saved or approved. When you're ready to run a pay, you sync the pay period — everyone who is ready, in one go — and see exactly who was sent and who wasn't.

1. Go to Team → Timesheets and click Sync to Xero. Only people who sign in with Xero see it.
2. Pick the pay calendar (Weekly, Fortnightly and so on) and the pay period. It opens on the latest period with hours; Previous and Next step a whole period at a time, and recent periods show whether they've been synced.
3. Check who is ready, and why anyone else isn't.
4. Click Sync, choose whether to Approve timesheets in Xero (on means they're ready for your pay run; off leaves them as drafts in Xero for you to check there — we remember your choice), and confirm.

Someone is ready when every one of their lines in that pay period is approved and has a Pay rate — the kind of pay in Xero, like Ordinary Hours. Nothing is guessed: a line with no pay rate is never sent. Machine hours never go to payroll, and neither do hours for anyone not paid through Xero Payroll or without a Xero pay calendar.

Hours your staff enter in the staff portal arrive without a pay rate. Set one on their timesheet, or use Set pay rate on the sync page to do a whole period at once — for each line, or the same rate for all of them.

If hours change after a sync, that person shows as Changed since sync; syncing again replaces what Xero has. If every line is deleted, syncing removes their timesheet from Xero. If Xero has already paid that period, it can't be changed from here — the page says Locked in Xero and shows the difference, so you can adjust it in Xero Payroll.

Syncing works with weekly, fortnightly and four-weekly pay calendars, and monthly calendars that start on the 1st. Other pay calendars show a note instead of a list; enter those hours in Xero Payroll directly.

Staff portal

The staff portal lets your crew fill in their own timesheets on their phone, instead of you typing them up from paper. Each person signs in with a link emailed to them — there's no password and no Xero login — and sees their own weeks, their jobs and anything you've posted for the team. Nothing in the portal shows a pay rate, theirs or anyone else's.

Turning it on

The portal is off until you switch it on. Go to Settings → Staff portal and turn on Let staff sign in to the portal. That opens the door; you still choose who comes in, one person at a time. Turning it off hides the portal from everyone straight away, and nothing they've entered is deleted.

Underneath are four tabs:

• Access — every active staff member, each with a Portal on / Portal off switch. Switching someone on for the first time emails them a sign-in link along with our privacy notice. After that, Send link sends a fresh one. There's also a switch for everyone at once, which tells you exactly how many people it will email before it does. Anyone without an email address is flagged, because there's nowhere to send their link. This tab is also where you open office pages to someone.
• Timesheets — the accounts your crew can code their hours to, up to 25, and which one new lines start on. Keep it short; it's a dropdown on a phone. While none are chosen, staff don't see an account field at all and their hours stay uncoded.
• Reminders — Email everyone their sign-in link each week, on the day and time you pick (New Zealand time). It goes only to people who haven't sent that week's timesheet in yet. It's off until you turn it on.
• Messages — short notices everyone with portal access sees when they open the portal ("Site closed 24–27 Dec"). Switch one off when it stops being true. You can also email a message to all staff, but that can't be undone — switching it off afterwards doesn't recall the email.

Who approves whose timesheet isn't set here — it follows the reporting lines on the staff org chart.

How your staff sign in

Staff go to the portal sign-in page, enter their work email and tap Send me my link. The link in the email works once and expires in 30 minutes; if it's gone stale, they just ask for another. Sign-in links you send from Settings work the same way.

Someone can sign in only while all of these are true:

• you've switched the portal on, and switched it on for them;
• they have an email address on their staff record;
• they have no finish date — once they've left, whether ended in Xero Payroll or marked as left here, their sign-in stops working;
• your FNA Manager subscription is active or you're still in your free trial.

The first time they sign in, they see a short Before you start page explaining who we are, where their details came from and who can see the hours they enter. It's a notice, not a contract — there's nothing to agree to — and the full privacy page stays linked at the bottom of every portal screen.

What your staff see

The portal is built for a phone, with a bar along the bottom: Dashboard, Timesheets and Me, plus Approvals for anyone who has people reporting to them and Office for anyone you've given office pages.

• Dashboard — a notice when a timesheet is overdue or has been sent back for a change, then your messages to staff. Below that, depending on the person: who they report to, Your schedule, what's Issued to you, and — for managers — Your team with how many weeks are waiting for approval. Job history lists the jobs they've booked hours to.
• Your schedule — the jobs they're booked on and any time they're down as away, with Download PDF and a calendar link they can add to their phone. See Scheduling.
• Issued to you — the vehicles, plant and gear assigned to them, and when each check is next due.
• Me — their job title, employment type and start date, read-only from your payroll records. They can change their first name, last name, phone and sign-in email. A new email only takes effect once they confirm it from the new inbox, and we let the old address know a change was asked for.

Entering a week

1. Under Timesheets, pick a week from Weeks to fill in. Weeks follow the person's Xero payroll calendar, or end on a Sunday if they don't have one.
2. For each day, Add a job, then enter what they were doing and either a Start and Finish time (with any unpaid Break in minutes, which is taken off) or just the Hours. If you've set up timesheet accounts, each line is coded to one.
3. If they drove a vehicle or ran a machine on that job, Add vehicle hours under the job line. They can copy their own hours on that job across, or enter the machine's hours separately. Those hours count as the machine's, not the person's.
4. A regular crew can start from Copy last time's jobs, which brings in the previous period's jobs, times, coding and machine hours to check and adjust.
5. Save as draft to come back later, or Submit for approval.

Before they submit, the form says who it goes to: their manager, if that manager is on the portal, or otherwise the office. The manager gets an email, and the week waits for them under Approvals — see approving timesheets. Until it's approved, the person can still open it and change it; saving it as a draft takes it back off the manager's list. If a week is sent back, they're emailed the reason and it shows on their dashboard. Approved days can't be changed from the portal.

Staff logins: office pages for your staff

Sometimes a staff member needs more than their own timesheet — an estimator who writes your quotes, or the person who chases everyone's hours. You can open parts of the office to them without giving them a Xero login.

On Settings → Staff portal → Access, find the person and make sure their portal is on. Under Office pages, switch on what they need:

• Jobs — the full job pages, including costs by account, where staff cost rates and plant rates are visible, and the schedule planner.
• Estimates — create, edit, mark sent and convert quotes, including internal costing and margins.
• Plant and Equipment — the machine list and each machine's page: purchase cost, depreciation, running cost per hour, utilisation and the keep/sell/replace advice.
• Staff — the staff list, each person's page and the org chart.
• Timesheets — everyone's hours: enter and edit any week for any person or machine, and approve or send back a submitted one.

They sign in with the same emailed link as the portal and reach the office through Office in the portal's bottom bar. They see only the pages you've switched on — no Settings, no dashboard, no billing. Some things stay with you whatever you grant: deleting a job, quote, machine, staff member or week of timesheets, deleting a group, and Keep on — not paid through payroll or Mark as left. Nobody can approve their own timesheet this way either; their own week still goes to their manager.

Switch a page off, or switch their portal off, and it ends on their next click. Turning their portal off keeps the office pages you'd chosen, so they come back if you switch access on again.

Two limits: an email address that already signs in to FNA Manager with Xero can't be a staff login — invite that person to the organisation in Xero instead — and one email address can have office pages at only one organisation.

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 Finances → 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 Finances → 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 Finances → 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 Finances → 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

Work → 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, or go to /settings. It's split into four tabs: General, Tax, Xero and Staff portal.

General

Four 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.
• Monthly operating overheads — read-only, calculated from last month's Xero P&L with wages and tax stripped out. Wages, tax and your regular payments are projected separately so nothing is double-counted.
• When money moves — the days your customers pay you and your supplier run goes out.
• Regular payments — rent, fees, insurance, card payments, finance and anything else that leaves the bank without a bill. Each is forecast on its own date.

Bank accounts — what each of your Xero bank accounts is (cash, a funding facility, staff cards), so the cashflow forecast counts each the right way.

Jobs & estimates — one form, saved together.

• Next estimate number — what's suggested for the next quote. 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.
• Next job number — the same for jobs. Change it to jump to a different series.

Company logo — see below.

Your company logo

Under General → Company logo. Upload a logo (PNG, JPG or WebP, up to 2MB) and it appears on your estimate PDFs — including the copies we keep each time you mark a quote sent. 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: 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), 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.
• 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, and its own trial and subscription. To switch between them, click your business name in the top-right, choose Accounts and users, then Switch account and pick the organisation you want. FNA Manager reloads with that business's data and refreshes it from Xero, which can take a moment.

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

Accounts and users

The Accounts and users page (under your business name, top right) is about the organisation you are in. Its name is the page title, and everything you can do to it is here:

• Export data — a copy of everything that exists only in FNA Manager, emailed to you as a download link. See exporting your data.
• Switch account — every other Xero organisation your login can open. Click one to switch to it. Add another account at the bottom of that list takes you to Xero to connect a new organisation.
• Users — everyone who has signed in to this organisation.
• Leave and Delete organisation — at the bottom, in their own card. They are very different things: see leaving and deleting below.

You can only leave or delete the organisation you are currently in, so switch to it first. The one exception is a demo company, which also has a Delete button in the Switch account list.

Trying it with a Xero demo company

If you want to try FNA Manager without connecting your real business, use Xero's Demo Company. It is a sample organisation Xero gives every login, filled with example invoices, bills and contacts.

1. In Xero, open My Xero (click your organisation name, top left) and choose Try the demo company. Xero opens the Demo Company (NZ) for your login.
2. In FNA Manager, go to Accounts and users → Switch account → Add another account. Xero asks which organisation to connect: pick the Demo Company.
3. FNA Manager syncs it like any other organisation. It is marked Demo account wherever it appears.

Three things to know about demo companies:

• It belongs to you alone. A Xero Demo Company is tied to the person, not the business, so nobody else in your organisation can see it in FNA Manager, and it never appears in their list.
• Xero resets it roughly every 28 days. When that happens Xero replaces it with a brand-new organisation. FNA Manager keeps your old copy, but shows it in Switch account as No longer connected in Xero with only a Delete button. Delete it, then add the new Demo Company with Add another account.
• Deleting a demo is immediate. There is no 30-day wait: everything in it is removed from FNA Manager straight away. Nothing in Xero is touched. You can always connect the Demo Company again.

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. Nothing is deleted when you cancel: your data is kept for six months so you can resubscribe and pick up where you left off — see if you stop paying for what happens after that.

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

If you stop paying

When a trial ends without a subscription, or a subscription ends, the organisation is paused, not deleted. Signing in takes you to the billing page, where you can subscribe to carry on — or, without paying anything, export your data free, delete the organisation, leave it, or contact us about a charge you want to dispute.

We keep a paused organisation's data for a stated time, and the billing page shows the exact date:

• 90 days after a free trial ends without a subscription.
• Six months after a subscription ends. The same applies if everyone has left the organisation.

We email everyone in the organisation 30 days and 7 days before that date. After 30 days paused we disconnect FNA Manager from Xero, so nothing keeps syncing; subscribing reconnects it. When the date arrives the organisation is permanently deleted, as described under deleting an organisation. Subscribing at any point before then keeps everything.

Exporting your data

Export data on the Accounts and users page is free and always available — during your trial, while subscribed, while paused for non-payment, and while an organisation is waiting to be deleted. We build the export in the background and email you a download link, which works for 7 days and only while you are signed in.

The export is a set of spreadsheets (CSV files), one per kind of record — staff, jobs, timesheets, estimates, equipment, retentions and so on — plus a data dictionary describing every column. Every reference is a readable name and a row number, so the files make sense on their own and can be loaded into another system.

It holds what exists only in FNA Manager. Your invoices, bills and payroll live in Xero and stay there; the export doesn't duplicate them. Timesheets (unless you push them to Xero Payroll), estimates and their attachments, job costing, equipment and retentions exist nowhere else, so if you need them for tax (7 years) or wage and time records (6 years), export before you delete.

Leaving an organisation

Leave removes the organisation from your list and disconnects your Xero login from it. Nothing is deleted: the organisation's data is kept, and everyone else in it keeps their access. That is true even if you are the last person in it — leaving is never the same as deleting. To use it again, connect it with Add another account.

If you were working in the organisation you left, FNA Manager moves you to another of your organisations, or signs you out if it was your last.

Deleting an organisation

Delete organisation removes the organisation and everything in it, for everyone. Because that is serious, it is a separate page with a warning, and it needs the right person: the Xero subscriber or a financial adviser user of that organisation in Xero, or the last person left in it in FNA Manager. Anyone else sees a note saying who to ask.

Type the organisation's name to confirm, and then:

1. The organisation is locked for everyone straight away, and everyone in it is emailed.
2. For 30 days anyone in it can still export its data or cancel the deletion from the page they land on.
3. Then it is permanently deleted, FNA Manager is disconnected from it in Xero, and everyone is emailed again.

Your invoices, bills and payroll stay in Xero, untouched. We keep only our own billing records (seven years, as the Tax Administration Act requires), a record that you accepted our terms, and a record that the deletion happened. Your login is not deleted — you can still use any other organisation you belong to.

We may pause a deletion where a dispute, a legal claim, a chargeback or an insolvency process means the data has to be kept. We will tell you if that happens.

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.