Most of this you can change whenever you like. Two or three of them you effectively can’t, because by the time you want to they’ll be woven through a year of postings.
So this page is less “here is every setting” and more “here’s the short list to get right on day one, and here’s everything else you can safely leave alone until it annoys you”.
What you can do
- Enter your company details and logo, which appear on everything you send.
- Choose the base currency your books are kept in.
- Set your fiscal year start, so periods and reports line up with your accountant’s.
- Decide whether your prices include tax, and to how many decimals.
- Turn on reverse charge if you sell across borders under it.
- Define numbering series for every kind of document, with your own prefixes.
- Add your own status labels for each document type.
- Keep your own units of measure and custom dropdown options.
- Write default terms for documents and for payment reminders.
- Hold your bank accounts, payment terms and delivery terms.
- Set password rules and how long a session can sit idle.
- Read the audit log of what changed in your company.
How it works in practice
Start with the company itself (Settings → Company). Name, address, registration and tax numbers, logo. This appears on your documents, so use exactly what your registration says rather than what your website says.
Choose the base currency before you post anything. It’s the currency your books, your reports and your balance sheet are kept in. You can invoice in other currencies, but the accounts are in this one, and once a single journal entry exists it’s locked. Changing the currency of a ledger that already holds figures isn’t a setting, it’s a migration.
Set the fiscal year start to match how you actually report. Everything with a period in it - budgets, tax returns, comparatives - takes its lead from this.
Decide the tax basics. Whether your catalog prices include or exclude tax, how many decimals prices carry, and whether reverse charge applies to how you sell. The first is the one people regret, because a catalog imported under the wrong convention is a catalog to do again.
Set up numbering (Settings → Sequence numbers). Each document type - quotes, invoices, credit notes, purchase orders, products, projects - has its own series with a prefix and a next number. Do this before your first real document, because invoice numbering is the thing an auditor notices, and a series that restarts mid-year takes explaining.
Make the status labels yours (Settings → Workflow statuses). If your team says “with the surveyor” rather than “in review”, say that. They’re per document type.
Add the units and options you use. Units of measure, and your own entries in the dropdowns that would otherwise force your business into somebody else’s vocabulary.
Write the terms once (Settings → Document terms). Default payment terms and the text at the foot of documents, plus a separate set for payment reminders where the wording escalates as the stages do. Setting these up once beats retyping them per invoice and getting the third reminder’s tone wrong.
Then the housekeeping. Bank accounts, delivery terms, the default recipients copied on document emails, the PDF filename pattern, password strength and expiry, and how many minutes of inactivity signs a user out.
Good to know
- The base currency locks the moment anything is posted. Choose it deliberately. If you’re trialling the system, remember that the first posted entry in the account you intend to keep is the one that fixes it.
- Numbering series should be set before your first real document, not after. Changing a prefix mid-year is allowed and occasionally sensible. Changing it repeatedly is how a numbering sequence stops looking sequential to whoever’s reviewing it.
- Prices including or excluding tax is a per-product setting with a company default. Mixing the two conventions is legal and sometimes necessary, but decide your default before importing a catalog.
- The chart of accounts is worth ten minutes with your accountant before you start rather than after your first quarter. See accounting and bookkeeping.
- Session timeout applies to everyone in the company, not per person, and it’s short by default. A shared machine at a trade counter and a private office want very different numbers.
- Number and date formatting follows the reader, not the writer. Your own screens format to your locale, while a customer-facing document formats according to the document’s language. Your German customer’s invoice reads the way German customers expect, regardless of who typed it.