Read getting started first, because it covers the one decision that cannot be changed afterwards and the order of work that stops you configuring a system around guesses.

Then roles and permissions, which takes ten minutes to act on and is considerably harder to retrofit once eight people are using the system.

Then setting up your pipeline, which is worth doing on paper before you touch any settings, using the two people test it describes.

Then importing your contacts, which is mostly spreadsheet advice, because ten minutes in the file saves an afternoon afterwards.

Then exporting your data, immediately, while there is nothing in the system worth losing. That is the only time you can safely find out what an export actually produces.

Elsewhere

The rest of the documentation is on the product pages

The thirteen product pages are more detailed than these articles and answer a different kind of question. Where a help article tells you how to do something, a product page explains why it works the way it does and what it deliberately does not do.

The security page is the most detailed page on this site and answers the questions a technical reader has, in the way pricing answers what each plan costs. The roadmap names what is not built instead of describing it as coming soon.

Two other places answer questions the help centre does not. The blog explains how the product is built and what building it that way costs, including why every organisation gets its own database. The customers page is for somebody still deciding, and it is mostly a list of questions to put to any supplier instead of a wall of logos.

If it is not here

How to get an answer

Write to hello@consonas.com and describe what you were trying to do rather than what you think the feature is called. A person reads it and you will get an answer.

No knowledge base

The knowledge base we did not build, and what its absence costs you

The ordinary shape for a page like this is four hundred short articles in a dozen categories behind a search box. That shape was considered properly and rejected, and the reasons are worth stating because you pay for them every time you read.

The cost first, because it is a real one

There is no search box on this site. Not on the help centre, not anywhere. When the paragraph you need sits two thirds of the way down an article of three thousand words, you get there by scrolling, by your browser's find within the page, or by arriving from a search engine that has already indexed the sentence you were looking for.

For someone who knows exactly what they want and wants it in ten seconds, that is worse than a knowledge base would be. We are not going to pretend it is not. It is a cost accepted in exchange for what follows.

No assistant in the corner, answering confidently

A chat window trained on this site would answer questions about the product with the fluency of somebody who has read every page and used none of it. The failure mode is not that it says nothing. It is that it describes a feature that does not exist, plausibly, at the exact moment you are deciding whether to trust the supplier.

The people this is written for who will never sign in

An open indexed help centre has an audience much wider than its customers, and that audience shapes the writing. The cost of it is that these pages are flatter and longer than a chatty help centre written only for people who have already paid.

The person doing diligence on a customer's behalf

An information technology contact, a data protection officer of the kind the Information Commissioner's Office describes, an insurer with a questionnaire. They read the security page and the legal pages, and then they read the help centre to check whether the instructions match the claims. A help article describing a workflow the security page says is impossible is a finding, and a fair one.

A screen reader, a translation engine and a printer

Where the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ask for text alternatives, ordinary prose is already one, which makes this the cheapest accessibility decision on the site. What it is measured against is written up on the accessibility page.

Help centre questions

Asked about the help centre

Why are there only five articles?

Because these five cover what people actually get stuck on, and we would rather write five properly than forty that repeat the interface back at you. The help centre grows with the product, and each new part is documented as it is built rather than afterwards.

Is there a video walkthrough?

No. Written documentation can be searched, skimmed, translated, read by a screen reader and referred back to at the exact point you need. A video can be none of those, and it is considerably harder to keep current when the product changes.

Is support included on the free plan?

The help centre and an address that a person reads. Support from a person with a target is on the paid plans, and priority support is on Enterprise. What Enterprise buys is a shorter target instead of a different quality of answer.

How will I know when an article changes?

You will not, unless you read it again. There is no change feed, no notification and no version history on these pages, and pretending otherwise would mean building three things to serve a question almost nobody asks. What does get announced is the product: the roadmap names what is not built instead of describing it as coming soon.

Something here is wrong. How do I tell you?

Write to hello@consonas.com with the page and the sentence. A wrong instruction is worse than a missing one, because someone follows it and then has to undo the result. Corrections go ahead of new articles in the queue, and we would rather hear it from the first person it confused than the third.

Is any of this available in another language?

Not today, in English only. It is written as plain sentences rather than as screenshots and video, which is the format a browser translates least badly, but that is a consolation rather than an answer. If you need documentation in another language before you could use the product, tell us, because that is worth knowing rather than guessing at.

Is the help centre different in the European Union and the United States?

No. The two regions differ in where your organisation's database physically sits, not in what the product does, so there is one set of articles. The only place region appears in the documentation is the decision to pick one, in getting started, because it is the single decision that cannot be undone afterwards.

Start with getting started

Half an hour of decisions, an afternoon including the import, and then leave it alone for a fortnight.

Read it Ask us instead

Three people, a thousand relationships, no card and no time limit.