A small, ordered plan that gets you to real Clients, real Invoices and real books in a week.
Most people sign up, click around for twenty minutes, and never come back — not because the software is wrong, but because they never got to the moment where it becomes useful. This is a plan for the first week that gets you there.
It is deliberately small. Half an hour on day one, then a few minutes a day. By the end of the week you will have real Clients, real Invoices and real books, rather than a tidy empty system.
That last step is the point of the whole exercise. Once you have seen an Invoice become bookkeeping without you typing it twice, everything else makes sense.
Under Accounting Settings › Invoice Settings, create the handful of Charge Types you actually bill for. Consulting, product, retainer, whatever fits. Each one maps to a revenue account, so from here on your Invoices file themselves correctly.
Import your existing contacts from a spreadsheet, or add your ten most important Clients by hand. Set the Client Type as you go — it is the field that makes reporting and Campaigns possible later, and it is far quicker now than retrofitting.
If the spreadsheet is awkward, do not fight it. The Excel upload is designed for exactly this, and we will map the columns with you at no charge.
If anyone else touches the business — an Assistant, a Bookkeeper, your Accountant, a partner — give them their own login rather than sharing yours. Add them as Sub Users and set what each of them can see.
The permissions are per person and per section, so this is not all-or-nothing:
Doing this in week one is far easier than retrofitting it after someone has been working in your login for six months. Access can be changed or removed at any time.
Hide the sections you will not use. Rename Clients if your business calls them something else. Set your Fast Menu to the three or four places you have found yourself returning to. Turn menu items off if you do not use them at all.
Pick whichever is most relevant: send a file for signature, set a Follow-Up Task on a Client, or scan a receipt into your expenses. One is enough. You are testing whether it fits your routine, not learning the whole product.
Then look at what you actually used. Turn off what you did not. If something felt clumsy, tell us through the Help Desk — that feedback is how the product gets better, and we do read it.
Use real data from the start. Test Clients called “asdf” are a false economy — you learn nothing and then have to clean them out.
Do not try to migrate everything at once. Bring in the Clients you are actively working with. Historic ones can wait, or stay where they are.
Send the awkward Invoice first. If one of your Invoices is complicated — multiple lines, taxes, a discount — try that one early. Better to find the rough edges in week one than in month three.
Set one Follow-Up Task. The first time a reminder appears on your Dashboard for something you would otherwise have forgotten, the system has paid for itself — and it was free anyway.
Give it two weeks before judging. Any system feels like extra work for the first few days, because you are setting up as well as working.
The order of this plan is not arbitrary. Profile before Invoice, because the Invoice carries your details. Charge Types before volume, because they decide where revenue posts. Client Type before Campaigns, because it is what you filter on.
Each step makes the next one automatic. That is the difference between a system that saves you time and one that just moves the admin somewhere else.
I do not have a real Client to add yet. Add yourself, or a supplier you deal with. You need one record to see how the pieces connect.
My spreadsheet will not import. Check the column headings against the template, and import a handful of rows first to confirm the mapping before doing the lot. The import guide walks through it, and we will do it with you for free.
I have set it up but I am not using it. That usually means the daily habit has not landed. Pick one thing — invoicing, or Follow-Ups — and do only that for a fortnight.
It feels like more work than my spreadsheet. For the first week it is. The return comes at Month End and Year End, when there is nothing to reconstruct.
Invoicing saves time immediately. The bigger return arrives at Month End and Year End, when the books are already done.
No. Most people start from today and leave historic records where they are. Your Accountant can advise if a mid-year switch needs anything specific.
Almost everything is editable. Charge Types, labels, menus and business details can all be changed later without losing data.
Do the first day yourself — it takes half an hour and you will understand your own setup. Your Bookkeeper can have their own login and pick it up from there.
Use the Help Desk. A real person answers, and you get an email when there is a reply. Setup help is free if you would rather someone walked you through it.
Adding two hundred Clients before setting Client Types is the one that causes real rework. Everything else is recoverable.
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