Your First 10 Minutes: Setting Up Your Organization

What this covers

The order of operations that gets you from a blank account to a working CRM in about ten minutes.

Why this order matters

The system is designed so each step makes the next one more useful — branding your documents before you send your first quote means you never send an unbranded one; setting up your pipeline stages before adding deals means you're not reorganizing later.

When to do this

Right after signup, before you invite your team or import real customer data — a five-minute setup now saves cleanup later.

How to do it

1. Set your branding. Go to Settings → Branding and add your logo, brand color, and business/banking details. This is what your customers see on quotes and invoices. See Setting Up Your Business Branding.
2. Check your pipeline stages. Go to Settings → Pipeline. The default stages (New, Qualified, Proposal, Negotiation, Won) work for most sales processes — rename or reorder them if yours is different. See Customizing Your Pipeline Stages.
3. Add a few real contacts and companies. Start with your five most important current relationships rather than importing everything at once — see Adding and Managing Contacts.
4. Create your first deal. Attach it to a contact or company, give it a value, and drop it into the right pipeline stage.
5. Invite your team, if you have one. Settings → Team — see Inviting Team Members and Roles Explained.
6. Send a real quote or invoice once you're ready — see Creating Your First Quote or Invoice.

You don't have to do all of this before using the system for real work — steps 1 and 2 are the only ones worth doing before anything else.