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 set up reminder terms for late invoices and expired quotes.
- Hold your bank accounts in your own country’s format, plus payment and delivery terms.
- Choose whether reports sit in one menu or in the section each one is about.
- Set password rules and how long a session can sit idle.
- See which address your email goes out from, and where your customers’ replies land.
- See where your data is stored.
- 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 → Sequences). 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). 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, set once rather than retyped per invoice.
Decide how you chase (Settings → Reminder Terms). Reminder terms are a timeline counted from the due date: a friendly email after 7 days, a firmer one after 14, a final one after 28. Each step has its own wording, and either goes out on its own or waits for somebody to read it first. A new company starts with that set already in place, every reminder held for review, plus a quote follow-up that stays paused until you switch it on. One set is the default; give a customer who needs different treatment its own. Workflows and reminders covers the builder.
Check which address your customers see (Settings → Email Server). By default your documents go out from an address we host for you, and that’s also where a customer’s reply arrives, which is what fills your mailbox. On a paid plan you can send from your own address instead. That’s a real trade: your name on the envelope, but delivery then depends on your own domain being set up to let us send for it, so the app stops guaranteeing that the mail arrives. A new sender address is confirmed by email (Settings → Email → Email Senders → Add sender): whoever reads that inbox opens the link, and it’s ready to use. They don’t need a login, so a shared billing@ address works.
Your bank details take your country’s shape (Settings → Bank accounts). A US company is asked for an account number and a routing number. A European one is asked for an IBAN and a BIC. Which fields appear and what they’re called follow your company’s country, and the remittance block on your invoices prints the same words the form does. The BIC stays available everywhere, labeled for international transfers, because that’s the one job it still has where it isn’t the main number.
Put the reports where you’ll look for them (Company settings → Navigation). Every report lives in the part of the system it’s about: sales reports under Sales, purchase reports under Procurement. It starts off. Switch the Reports menu on if the whole company would rather see them in one place.
Then the housekeeping. 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.
- Where your data is stored is shown, and it isn’t a setting. Settings → Company tells you which region holds your account. It’s read-only because it describes where we actually run, and a dropdown you could change would be describing a move that hadn’t happened. There’s one region today, so everybody’s answer is the same one.
- 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.