A deadline view for teams whose deadlines are set by law rather than by them. It doesn't ask what's due — it works it out.
A 40-person accounting practice was tracking statutory deadlines across three spreadsheets and a shared inbox. Nobody could answer the only question that mattered on a Monday morning — what is at risk this week — without twenty minutes of cross-referencing. Two penalties in one quarter made it urgent.
The existing tool wasn't missing features. It was missing a point of view about which of its four hundred rows a person should look at first.
Rather than build another filterable table, treat the deadline itself as the object and the entity as its attribute. That inversion turns a search problem into a reading problem: the week is the frame, and everything inside it is already sorted by consequence.
Colour is used for exactly one thing — days remaining — and nothing else on the screen is allowed to compete with it.
Reference landscape
- Linear — Right about density, wrong about calendar time
- Google Calendar — Right about the week as a frame, no notion of risk
- Xero — Correct domain, but every deadline is entered by hand
“Generate deadlines instead of tracking them.”
Every statutory deadline is derivable from two facts the system already holds: the entity type and its year-end. Once you accept that, the entire data-entry surface disappears and the product stops being a tracker and starts being an assistant. It also removes the single largest source of error — a human typing a date.
Stage by stage
01
Map landscape
Eight tools reviewed, from compliance-specific software to general project managers. The compliance tools knew the dates and hid them; the project tools showed everything and knew nothing.
02
Gap analysis
The gap wasn't a feature. Every tool made the user the source of truth for dates that are, in fact, published by a regulator and completely predictable.
03
Information architecture
The week became the top-level frame, entity the second. Everything below that is a filter, and no filter is required to make the screen useful.
04
Design system
One colour ramp, mapped to days remaining. Six components carry the whole surface: row, badge, owner chip, week header, risk marker and empty state.
What was difficult
Deadlines that move when a public holiday lands on them.
The generated date and the effective date are shown as one object with a quiet annotation, rather than two competing dates. The user sees the truth; the system carries the arithmetic.
A week with sixty items looked like a wall.
Rows collapse by entity above a threshold, with the highest-risk item promoted out of the group. Density stays honest without becoming unreadable.
Exactly what you get
- Figma source
- 6 screens
- Light + dark
- React + Tailwind
- Interactive prototype
- Version
- 1.0.0
- Formats
- Figma, React, Tailwind
- Screens
- 6
- Components
- 14
- Dark mode
- Yes
- Prototype
- Yes
- Accessibility
- AA
- Figma
- 2026.2
Dependencies
- Inter — SIL Open Font Licence — free to bundle, and it is
- Lucide — ISC licence
Commercial fonts are never redistributed — they are named and linked, with a free equivalent substituted in the delivered files.
The Monday morning question went from twenty minutes of cross-referencing to a glance. Turned the app from a tracker into an assistant.
