Setting Up Your Workspace The foundations, in dependency order: company basics, hubs, departments and roles, and why this sequence cannot be rearranged.

The workspace half of setup. One or two people do this, usually the owner with an HR and an IT lead alongside. Follow it in order - each stage is a prerequisite for the next, and skipping ahead means redoing work.

Track your progress in Explore, then Get started, which detects what is already done.

1. Company Basics

Identity, currency, timezone, security and branding. These propagate into payroll, invoicing, exchange rates and scheduling, and they are hard to change afterwards.

• Branding - logo, colours, legal name, tax number. Set before you send anything, because it lands on every invoice and email. See Branding.
• Base currency - one value for the whole organisation. Changing it later re-values every stored figure and requires a security PIN. Decide once. See General.
• Date format and timezone - the workspace defaults.

2. Your Hubs

A hub is a legal entity, not an office. Each carries its own tax registrations, bank accounts, invoice numbering, working week and currency.

Create one per entity you actually trade from. Even a single-entity business needs one, because records attach to a hub and retrofitting that is painful.

Set the working hours and days here too - attendance late-detection and booking availability both read them, so a hub with the wrong workweek produces wrong attendance from day one. See Hubs.

3. Departments, Roles And Access

Do this before onboarding anyone, because it decides what they can see the moment they arrive.

1. Define your departments. They drive inbox routing, the org chart and approval scoping. Each needs a manager - a department without one silently breaks manager-chain notifications and leaves any shared inbox unowned.
2. Create your roles with sensible weights. Weight decides both what someone can reach and what they can approve. See Roles.
3. Set permissions per role, reviewing the diff before committing. See Permissions.

4. Invite Your Team

Bring in your HR, IT and Finance leads early - each has their own tab in the setup guide and can work in parallel. You do not have to finish the workspace alone, and the people who own each area will make better decisions in it than you will.

5. Shape Before Data

The order that saves the most rework:

1. Custom fields - anything you track that the platform does not ship with. Imports map to these, so they must exist first. See Custom Fields.
2. Pipelines and stages - deals need somewhere to land.
3. Then import. See Migrating From Another CRM.
4. Then clean. Imported data is never clean; work the queues before building on it. See Data Management.

6. Connect Your Tools

Google or Microsoft, email sending, voice, AI. Several later features are gated on these. See Connecting Your Tools.

7. Finance, Then Revenue

Accounts, tax rates and payment terms have to exist before an invoice or a deal line can carry correct tax. Pipelines, catalogue and document templates come after, because they depend on hubs, currency and tax.

8. Everything Else

Modules, communications, bookings, automations, then dashboards last - reporting reads everything above it, and a dashboard built on unreconciled data produces confident wrong numbers.

A Realistic Shape

• Week 1 - company basics, hubs, departments and roles. Invite the leads.
• Week 2 - custom fields, pilot import, full import, clean the queues.
• Week 3 - integrations, first automations, one department live.
• Week 4 - the remaining departments, then dashboards.

Most of that is deciding rather than typing.

Common Questions

Can we skip hubs with one entity? No. Create the one. Records attach to it, and adding it later is worse.

We already imported and now need a field. Create it, then import just that column matched to existing records. More work than doing it first; not a disaster.

How much can we change later? Most things. The expensive ones are base currency, hub structure and anything already printed on a document sent to a customer.

Do we need every module? No. Turn on what you will use. Unused modules are surfaces your team learns to ignore.