Setting up your organization

Your organization is the workspace for your business: clients, projects, quotes, contracts, invoices, settings, and admin team. Its branding is used across supported portal, document, and email surfaces.

Sign up and complete onboarding

Start at Sign up. Enter your account details and complete account verification first. New admin accounts then complete Secure your account through Clerk: add and verify a phone number under Account, enable an available two-step verification method under Security, save your recovery codes, and choose Verify and continue. This checks your actual signed-in session before you reach the admin dashboard. Account verification messages are separate from optional business/marketing SMS.

The final account-signup step displays the complete Terms of Service and Privacy Policy in separate tabs. Open both documents and scroll to the end of each; only then can you select I have read and agree and Finish signup. Reading a document does not select the checkbox for you. Client-portal signup retains its separate flow and is not required to complete admin security setup.

Switching between the document tabs or clicking away and back preserves your review progress. If saving fails, retry without repeating the review. You can sign out instead of agreeing. Existing accounts are prompted when their accepted document versions are no longer current, not simply because an app update was deployed.

Then follow Organization setup:

1. Business name: create your workspace; this does not start billing or connect client payments.
2. Industry: choose relevant defaults or General; this does not restrict the work you can quote.
3. Contact details: optionally set the client-activity notification email and portal greeting.
4. Business & Billing Info: save your business profile, or skip it and complete it later in Settings.
5. Payment method and plan: review Standard or Pro, monthly or annual, and continue to Stripe Checkout. First-time subscribers activate their 30-day trial by completing Checkout with a payment method. The selected plan renews after the trial, plus applicable tax; cancel before the trial ends to avoid the subscription charge. A $0.00 receipt email confirms the trial start, the trial end date, and the first charge. Returning subscribers do not receive another trial.

Plan selection appears only at this final pre-payment step, not above the account-creation form. If you arrived from a pricing button, that preference is carried forward as the initial selection; you can change the plan and billing frequency here before starting Checkout.

Your platform subscription and client-payment onboarding are separate. After setup, connect client payments and review invoice defaults before sending bills. Resume secure Checkout reopens the same pending checkout, including one started in another tab. To choose a different plan, use Close unfinished checkout first. Closing expires only an unfinished payment page; it does not cancel a paid subscription. A completed or uncertain checkout is checked before another subscription can be created. If the page requests support review, do not create another workspace just to pay again.

If an existing admin session needs two-factor verification, the guided Account security screen verifies that session without displaying another sign-in form underneath an already-signed-in account. Existing admins can use their enrolled authenticator without adding a new phone merely to reverify.

You become the organization's owner. Use an accurate business/display name. Keep the legal entity and DBA details accurate too; a long legal name is not inherently wrong.

If an earlier signup left a linked but inactive staff membership, Staff access review explains the next step instead of asking you to create another organization. Contact the business owner or support, or use your latest valid invitation. Refreshing setup does not activate pending/revoked access, and this screen does not perform an automatic repair.

Industry helps choose relevant defaults and starter content. It does not mean every job your business quotes must be in that industry.

The dashboard's welcome tour and getting-started checklist guide the next steps. Use Help → Replay walkthrough or Help → Show getting-started checklist to reopen them from elsewhere in your workspace. See The welcome tour and setup checklist for what counts as complete, which tools are optional, and how the owner records an invoice-defaults review without sending an invoice.

Branding, logo, and support email

Open Settings → Branding to review:

• Business name and logo.
• Support email for client-activity notifications. When set, these notifications go there instead of your sign-in email; leave it blank to use the sign-in email.
• Default currency and client-portal greeting.
• Portal theme and accent color. Keep Match my theme's accent color enabled to use that theme's accent, or choose a custom accent.

Use a clear logo with enough resolution for PDFs and email, and check it against both light and dark backgrounds. Preview an actual document after changing branding. A logo or theme does not replace the need to review a document's text and recipients.

Optional email domain

Settings → Email Domain supplies the verification records for sending branded mail from your own domain. This is separate from the support-email field.

Reply routing depends on the verified sending/inbound-domain configuration. Do not assume the support-email field changes the From address or that replies will always go to a DNS-hosted mailbox. See Email domain setup.

Connect client payments

Settings → Stripe Connect offers new Express-account onboarding and connection of an existing Standard account. The account is created when you start the corresponding payment onboarding flow—not simply when you first save the business name.

Complete Stripe's requirements and check charge/payout readiness before relying on client payments. Your Contractor Codex subscription checkout is a different account/billing relationship. See Connecting Stripe.

Save your signature

At Settings → Signatures, save your signature for reuse. The quote/agreement composer lets the sending admin choose a saved, typed, or drawn signature.

In-house quotes and agreements normally go out with the company signature already applied. Review the send result and document: a signature application failure or a document requiring countersign can still need attention. DocuSign and change-order behavior differs; see Sending contracts for signature.

Billing entity details

Settings → Billing Profile holds legal name, DBA, entity type, business address, tax-ID last four digits, and accounts-payable contact details.

These identify the business for platform billing and supported tax/account workflows. They do not replace Stripe's identity verification. Enter the information requested by setup; do not assume it is optional for every subscription or tax flow. Ask support about exemption status rather than putting exemption claims in an unrelated field.

Display and timezone

Set display preferences under Settings → Display. Review how dates appear in your account. Display preferences are not a promise that every background billing job runs at the same local hour; check the billing schedule separately.

Bringing in existing data

Import Data accepts CSVs for clients, projects, and the price catalog. The flow is upload, map columns, preview, then confirm. The limits are 5 MB and 5,000 rows per file.

Import clients before projects so project rows can match an existing client email. Review skipped duplicates and row errors before confirming; download problem rows to correct them separately.

A batch can offer Roll back, but records that already have dependent work are retained. Read the reported removals/retentions; rollback is not a way to erase invoices, signed documents, or established work.

Team management — two different things

Client team

The customer's team signs into that client's portal. Its owner manages invitations and removals at /dashboard/settings/team. A contact in your address book is not automatically a portal member, and a co-signer is not automatically a teammate.

See Team and access for organization access; use the client portal's team controls for the customer's team.

Org admin team

Your own team is managed at Settings → Team. Owners can invite people, change roles, resend pending invitations, and remove access. The current invitation link lasts 14 days.

• Owner: includes ownership/team controls.
• Admin: operational read/write access without every owner-only control.
• Viewer: read-only access.

At least one owner must remain. Inviting your own email is unnecessary; an address already attached to a client-side portal identity can also be rejected. The team page explains the applicable restriction.

New staff invitations cannot add a second organization to a login that already has an active staff workspace; this version has no admin workspace selector. Existing access is preserved when the new invitation is rejected. Re-inviting an already-active teammate reports their existing access without sending a duplicate email. See Team and access.

Before sending the first quote

Check the business identity, recipient, scope, quantities, prices, currency, billing mode, company signature, and preview. Confirm Stripe readiness for modes that issue Stripe invoices. You may use an existing client or enter a new prospect; a logo is recommended but not a signing requirement.

Built-in agreement text is not attorney-reviewed. The Contracts area asks each admin to acknowledge its current legal notice; this records awareness, not legal approval or a guarantee against liability.

Use Your admin dashboard to find the next action. For account deletion, organization identity changes, or payment-account migration, contact support first; these are not all reversible settings changes.