Take control of long-term tasks with milestones

Job and task management is a core feature of any accountancy practice management software.

Jobs in Pixie are an easy way to keep track of tasks and deadlines for all the work in an accountancy practice. The My Day view hides away the work with deadlines out in the distant future, allowing you to focus on the important tasks for today. Our goal is to ensure you never feel overwhelmed by having to manage a list with hundreds of items in it.

However, some jobs are long-running by their very nature and cannot be compressed into a day or two of work. Take year end accounts preparation and filing for example. Once the year ends, companies have 9 months to prepare and file their accounts. In these scenarios, the one thing you'll want to avoid is having such a big job come into My Day only when the accounts are due.

To avoid this problem we're introducing Job Milestones in Pixie.

Keep moving forward

Through multiple conversations with accountants to try and understand the underlying problems, we noticed long term jobs could be divided into multiple phases. Using the example above for year end accounts, one could consider the following phases:

• Meet with client to discuss tax optimisations 6-8 weeks before the year ends
• Set up the new financial year in the accounting software and request information from the client
• Prepare the accounts
• Meet with client to review prepared accounts
• File accounts

Each phase can have multiple tasks, and a phase can be considered completed when all its tasks are done. At the end of each phase you'll have achieved a milestone.

This type of organisation lets you radically improve your time management and keep the job moving forward. This prevents work from accumulating around the final deadline day.

Milestones in a real-world situation

When editing Pixie's default "Year End accounts" job template for example, you will find a new type of task called "Milestone".

Milestones are time-based and you'll need to specify it's expected duration in days/weeks/months. Once this time passes, the milestone will be considered overdue if its tasks haven't been completed.

Here's a quick example of how it'll look like in a job. This job's final deadline is 31 May 2020, however in My Day the deadline appears as the closest milestone.

In this case, the job has a milestone coming up on 2 September. It has two tasks:

If we mark the first two tasks as done, Pixie considers the milestone to be completed.

And finally, the deadline for the job in My Day moved to the next milestone on 1 March 2020:

Improve your time management

Job milestones help you manage long-running work better, by breaking it down into meaningful smaller checkpoints.

With job milestones Pixie helps you get organised by taking things off your plate, not creating more work for you.

New customers of Pixie will already have milestones in job templates. If you are an existing customer, you can add Milestones to any existing job or job template by navigating to it, clicking on "Edit" and adding a new task of type "Milestone".