Set up your firm

Until setup is marked complete, everyone except those who may manage the firm sees The firm is still being set up. The firm administrator sees a card, Finish setting up the firm, with a checklist of what must be on file: Firm name, TIN, Address, City, Phone, Email, Head office, Client bank account and Office bank account. When none is missing, choose Mark setup complete and confirm. From then on everybody can sign in and start work, and setup stays complete. Everything here can be changed later, and every change is recorded.

The profile

Open Settings, Firm, then Profile, and complete:

• Identity: the firm's name, trading name, registration number and TIN.
• Address and contact: address lines 1 and 2, city, region, postal address, phone, email and website.
• Financial year and defaults: when the financial year starts, the base currency, the default language and format, and the default time zone.
• VAT registration: whether the firm is registered, its VAT registration number and the day it was registered from.

Offices and bank accounts

Add each office, and mark the head office. Add the bank accounts the firm uses, naming which are client accounts and which are office accounts: the books keep client money apart from the firm's own, and they read it from here.

Logo and letterhead

Under Settings, Firm, Profile, Branding, the letterhead is edited beside a live drawing of it: a first page and a later page, redrawn as you type. Branding has six pages: Letterhead, Identity, Email, Signature, Versions and History. This article covers Letterhead and Versions; see Your firm's brand for Identity, Send email from your firm's domain for Email and The firm's email signature for Signature.

• Logo. Upload the logo once; the system keeps a screen copy and a print copy from the same file. Choose whether it prints at the head, its width in millimetres (its height follows), and where it stands: at the left, centre or right of the head, beside the words on either side, or above or below them.
• Head text. Choose which lines of the firm's record appear, their order, alignment, weight and size, stacked or side by side.
• Footer. A footer line, a small copy of the logo above it if you want one, and the closing block every letter ends with.
• Regulated details. The registration number, TIN, VAT number and the partners' names, each read from the firm profile, the managing partner first. A detail the profile does not hold cannot be switched on until it is recorded there.
• Type and margins. One of the print-safe typefaces and the top, side and bottom margins. The accents print in the firm's brand colour, set under Identity (see Your firm's brand), shaded where it would not read on white paper.
• Pages. If the firm already has designed stationery, upload it as a picture of the whole page: one for the first page, and one for the pages after it if they differ. It is printed edge to edge, fitted to the width or covering the page. Without artwork for later pages they carry a slim head, the firm's name and the page number, or nothing.

Exact PDF draws the true pages the server prints, unsaved changes included, and opens them in the viewer. Save, and the letterhead takes a new version.

Preview with a document draws a document template on the letterhead as edited, its first and later pages: choose the template, and a matter to fill it from, or none to fill it with the catalogue's example values. A matter is offered only where you may see it.

Sample data

To see the system working before the firm has real work in it, open Settings, Firm, Profile, Sample data and choose Load sample data. Matters, clients, bills, documents and the people who work them are added beside the firm's own records, for the features the firm has on now. The sample people never sign in. It takes a few minutes: Standing reads Being loaded and then Loaded, a bar says how far it has got, and anything entered while it loads counts as sample. A line above every screen says while sample data is loaded.

When the firm is ready for real work, choose Clear sample data and say why. Everything the sample brought goes, with what cannot stand without it, such as time recorded on a sample matter. Records the firm made itself stay, and settings the sample changed return to the firm's own unless they were changed since. Loading and clearing need the firm.sample_data permission.

Versions

Every save is a version, listed under Branding, Versions with who saved it and when; open any one to see its exact pages, or choose Restore this to put the letterhead back as it printed, as a new version. A document records the version it was printed on, shown on its record as Printed on, and a bill drawn again after it is fiscalised prints on the same version. Changing the letterhead never changes a letter already sent.

A letterhead for each office

An office can print on its own letterhead. Open the office under Offices and its Letterhead tab, then choose which groups it takes from the firm: the head with the type and margins, the footer with the regulated details, and the pages. The groups it does not take are set there, with the same editors, and the drawing shows what the office's documents print on. A document prints on its matter's office letterhead; a document for the firm as a whole prints on the head office's. Clear puts the office back on the firm's letterhead, after asking.