The first path, and the one with the most consequences per decision. Everything configured later inherits from here.
The order
1. Company details. Name, address, registration, reporting currency, financial year. See General settings.
Currency and financial year are the two to get right first. Both are painful to change once transactions exist, because everything recorded under the old value has to be reinterpreted.
2. Hubs. See Hubs.
3. Branding. See Branding.
4. Numbering. See Invoice and employee numbering.
Hubs, and why this is the big one
A hub separates a part of your organisation whose numbers should stand alone: an office, a legal entity, a business line.
This is the decision that costs most to revisit, because it scopes almost every list in the product. Records belong to a hub, reports are read per hub, and people act within one.
Fewer than you think. The instinct is one hub per office. The question to ask is narrower: do these need separate books? If the answer is no, they are one hub with a location field, and everybody's life is simpler.
One is a legitimate answer. Plenty of organisations run on a single hub for years.
Read Hubs before deciding. It covers what actually splits and what does not.
Branding
Your logo, colours and the details that appear on anything a customer sees.
Worth doing early rather than perfectly. An invoice sent with a placeholder logo is a small embarrassment that happens on day one if this is left, and it is twenty minutes of work.
Set the dark variant too. People use the product in both themes, and a logo that vanishes on a dark background is the most common branding complaint.
Numbering
How invoices, employees and other records are numbered.
Decide before the first record, not after. Numbering is a sequence, and inserting a scheme partway through leaves you with two, forever, which your accountant will notice.
Match what you already use if you are migrating. Continuity in invoice numbers matters to auditors and to customers reconciling old statements against new ones.
Keep the prefix short. It appears everywhere, including on documents where space is tight.
Branding, one more thing
Whatever you upload appears on documents customers keep. Invoices get filed, contracts get archived, and both outlive the version of your logo that was current when they were sent.
Use the real asset rather than a screenshot of it, and check one generated document at full size before considering this done.
Financial year
Frequently wrong because January is assumed.
If your year does not start in January, set it now. Reporting periods, budgets and closing all depend on it, and every one of them silently produces the wrong answer if it is wrong.
Registration details
Company registration and tax numbers appear on invoices and are checked by customers reconciling them. Enter them once, correctly, rather than leaving placeholders that quietly ship on real documents.
Hubs against fields
The distinction that decides most of this path.
A hub separates books. Different numbers, reported apart, acted in one at a time.
A field describes a record. Office, region, team. Filterable, groupable, and shared across everybody.
If somebody wants to see London and Dubai split in a report, that is a field. If London and Dubai need their own invoice sequences and their own accounts, that is a hub. Choosing the heavier answer for a reporting requirement is the most common over-configuration in a first setup.
What not to configure yet
Pipelines. They depend on how you sell, which is worth a conversation with the people who sell. See Pipeline settings.
Custom fields. Wait until you have imported real data. See Custom fields.
Automations. Nothing to automate yet.
Approval policies. They reference roles that do not exist yet. See Approval policies.
Test in a spare browser
Sign in as nobody, in a private window, and look at anything public: a booking page, a document link. What a customer sees is not what an administrator sees, and this is the cheapest way to find out.
Decisions worth writing down
Not in the product. In a document somebody can find in a year.
Why the hubs are the way they are. Somebody will propose changing them, and the reasoning is not recoverable from the configuration.
What counts as a deal. The definition drifts, and reporting drifts with it.
Which numbering scheme and why, particularly if it continues an older sequence.
Three paragraphs. The alternative is an argument in eighteen months that nobody can settle, because everyone involved has left or forgotten.
Currencies
If you invoice in more than one currency, set the reporting currency to the one your accounts are filed in, not the one you sell most in.
Everything is converted back to it for reporting, and changing it later means every historical figure is restated. See General settings.
Checking it worked
Create one test record and look at it. The hub is right, the numbering looks like you intended, the branding appears.
Generate one document. A draft invoice shows branding, numbering, currency and company details all at once, which is four checks in one action.
Do it before anybody else arrives. Fixing this on an empty system is minutes. Fixing it on a populated one is a migration.
If you inherited a configured tenant
Check these four before assuming anything.
The financial year, because a wrong one is invisible until a report is wrong.
The reporting currency, for the same reason.
How many hubs exist and why, because it explains a great deal about how everything else was set up.
Whether numbering has already started. If invoices exist, the scheme is now fixed in practice whatever the setting says.
Next
People and access, which should happen before anybody logs in.
Your channels can start in parallel, and should, because parts of it involve waiting.
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