One page. Use it to work through a new setup, or to find what was never finished in one somebody else did.
Tick nothing you have not verified. The point of the list is the checks, not the settings.
Organisation
- Company details, reporting currency and financial year. General settings
- Hubs decided and created. Hubs
- Branding, including the dark variant. Branding
- Numbering set before the first record. Invoice and employee numbering
Full path: Setting up the organisation.
People and access
- Roles created, four or five rather than one per person. Roles
- Permissions set closed, opened where needed. Permissions
- Record visibility decided per role. Who sees whose records
- Departments matching how work arrives
- Notification policy set to less rather than more. Notification policy
- One person added and checked before the rest. Onboarding someone
- Somebody has logged in as ordinary staff and tried to see something they should not
Full path: People and access.
Channels
- WhatsApp verification started early. Connecting your number
- Phone number provisioned or ported. Phone setup
- Domain connected. Connecting your own domain
- Personal email connected. Connecting your tools
- Shared addresses created and routed. Email addresses and routing
- Forwarding configured. Forwarding mail from your provider
- Routing rules, few, with a catch-all that reaches a person. Inbox ownership and auto rules
- Web chat switched on only where somebody watches it. Web chat and chat intents
- Consent handled before any bulk messaging. Consent and opt-out
- A test message sent and received on every channel
Full path: Your channels.
Data
- Structure decided before importing anything
- Custom fields added first, and few. Custom fields
- Sample of twenty imported and inspected
- The awkward records checked: apostrophes, missing emails, other currencies
- Full import run. Importing spreadsheets
- Orphans and duplicates cleaned. Data management
- Totals reconciled against the old system, by value not count
- A date set to stop using the old system
- Export tested, so you know how to get data out. Exporting your data
Full path: Bringing your data in.
Finance
- Accountant consulted before the chart was built
- Chart of accounts, started from standard. Chart of accounts
- Tax rates including zero-rated and exempt. Tax
- Mappings checked with one invoice, one expense, one payment. GL mappings
- Opening balances at a period boundary, reconciled. Bringing your books in
- Approval thresholds set at an amount that means something. Approval policies
- A test invoice raised, paid, inspected in the ledger, and reversed
Full path: Finance.
AI
- Done after data, not before
- Providers active. How it is set up
- Custom instructions written with your real rules. Persona and guardrails
- Vocabulary and policies loaded, and retrieval tested. Teaching the assistant
- Model chosen and a fallback set on a different provider. Choosing your model
- One agent, creating tasks only, watched for a week. AI agents
Full path: AI.
Ongoing, not one-off
Four of these stop being true over time, and nothing announces it.
Access set up for twelve people is wrong for forty. Knowledge loaded in January describes a policy that changed in April. Routing rules built for three departments break when a fourth appears. Numbering schemes get exhausted.
Worth running this page again every six months. It takes twenty minutes and catches all four.
Operations
- Pipelines set up after talking to the people who sell. Pipeline settings
- Document templates for anything sent repeatedly. Document templates
- Meeting types, if meetings are recorded. Meeting types and frameworks
- Leave types and the working week. Leave types and allowances
- Service levels, if you run support. SLA policies
- SOPs for anything done the same way twice. SOPs
- Automations only after everything they reference is stable
The wider Operations order is in Setting up Operations in order.
How to work through it
Tick nothing you have not checked. A checklist filled in from memory is a list of assumptions.
Do the checks, not the settings. The items that say "somebody has logged in as ordinary staff" and "a test message sent and received" are the ones that catch real problems. The configuration items mostly get done; the verification items mostly do not.
Using this on an existing setup
Most people reading this did not start from empty. Read it as an audit rather than a plan.
Work down, not up. The items at the top are the ones with the most downstream consequence, and a gap there explains problems further down that look unrelated.
Anything unticked is a decision, not a failure. Plenty of organisations legitimately have no agents, no web chat and one hub. What matters is that it was chosen rather than missed.
Do it with two people. One who set it up and one who did not. The second person asks the questions the first stopped seeing.
Print it or do not
This page works read aloud in a room with the people who own each section. Working through it alone at a desk is how the verification items get ticked without being done.
What is not on this list
Deliberately.
Pipelines, boards and templates beyond the basics, because they depend on how you work and are better built once real work is flowing through them.
Automations, because everything they reference has to be stable first, and on a new tenant nothing is.
Reporting, because there is nothing to report on yet. Come back to it after a full month of real data.
Leaving those out is not an omission. Building them on day one guarantees rebuilding them in month two.
The four that get skipped
Not because they are hard.
Logging in as ordinary staff. Administrators cannot see their own permission mistakes.
Reconciling import totals by value. Counts agreeing is not the same as data being right.
Testing retrieval after loading knowledge. Uploading is not the same as being found.
Setting a fallback model on a different provider. A fallback sharing a vendor with the primary fails at the same moment.
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