Getting started

Consonas asks for six decisions before anybody else signs in, and exactly one of them cannot be changed afterwards. That is the whole of the setup, and the order you take it in decides how much of it you later have to undo.

The instinct when setting up a system like this is to configure it thoroughly before anyone uses it. Add the fields, build the views, design the process, then invite the team and begin.

That order produces a system built entirely on guesses about your own process, and the guesses are usually inherited from whatever you are leaving. Organisations that do it this way commonly add a dozen custom fields on the first afternoon and fill in three of them ever.

The order that works is almost the reverse. Make the six decisions below, which take about half an hour. Import what you have. Use it for real work for a fortnight with two or three people. Then configure, because by then you know what you actually need rather than what you assumed.

One decision is permanent, and it is not the one people worry about

People spend time on the organisation name, which can be changed, and almost none on the region, which cannot. Choose the European Union if you are a UK organisation. It is the closest region available and it carries the data protection posture the Data Protection Act 2018 and the guidance from the Information Commissioner's Office expect. There is no United Kingdom region and we would rather say so here than let you find out at signup.

There is no setting to move it afterwards, including for us, and if a region cannot be honoured the product refuses to create the organisation instead of putting it somewhere else and mentioning it later. The reason it is physical rather than a label is that your organisation gets its own database, which is created in the region you pick.

1. Create the organisation and choose the region

Register with an address you control, verify it, and create the organisation. Choose the region deliberately rather than accepting whatever is first. Everything else on this page is reversible and this is not.

2. Name your relationship types

In settings, before anything else. Use the words your team says out loud in the office: client, member, tenant, candidate, supplier, referrer. Four or five is plenty.

This is the single change that makes the product feel like yours rather than like software you are operating, and it takes five minutes. The word people type into search is the word they use when talking to each other, not the word a software company chose.

3. Set your working hours

The week your business actually works, including the days you do not. Every target and duration in the product is counted against it, so a business open on Saturdays and closed on Wednesdays needs this right or every deadline it ever sets will be slightly wrong in a way nobody can quite explain.

4. Build one pipeline

Five or six stages describing your process from first contact to won, each with a likelihood. Guess the likelihoods for now: after a quarter the stage history will tell you what they should be and you can correct them from data.

Resist twelve stages. If your stages are things somebody does rather than states a deal is in, the board will stop being kept current within a fortnight of anybody getting busy. Setting up your pipeline carries the test for telling the two apart, and the sales page explains what the stage history is then good for.

5. Import what you already have

Upload the spreadsheet and read the preview carefully. Nothing is written until you approve it, so the worst outcome of trying is that you learn something about your own file. The skipped rows are usually the most informative part, because they are where the file disagrees with itself.

Import less than you think you should. This is covered properly in importing your contacts, and it is the advice most worth taking.

6. Run an export

Immediately, with almost nothing in it. You learn what it produces and that it works while the stakes are nothing, which is the only time to find that out. It is free on every plan and takes ten seconds.

7. Invite two people

Not eight. The two or three who will actually use it daily, with roles that match what they do. Everyone else can come once it is obviously working, and they will arrive to something that already makes sense rather than to a half configured system they form opinions about.

Use it for real work and change nothing

Two weeks of actual use with two or three people. Record enquiries with their source. Move deals when the world changes rather than when someone remembers. Put every promise in as a task against the record it concerns.

Resist configuring during this period. The temptation to add a field the moment someone wants one is strong and it is how a system accumulates twelve fields that three people fill in.

The test at the end

Ask someone to answer a question about a customer they do not own, without asking anybody else. Where things stand, what was agreed, what happens next.

If they can, the system is working and you should invite everyone. If they cannot, the gap is almost always the same: the conversations are still in a mailbox, which is what the email module is for and which arrives on Standard.

Now configure, from evidence

After a fortnight you will know which two or three custom fields you actually want, which views your team keeps rebuilding by hand, and whether your stages describe your process. Those are three real requirements rather than twelve guesses.

Build the shared views first. Most disagreements about numbers in a small organisation are disagreements about definitions, and a shared view turns a definition into something written down that everyone uses.

After a quarter

Correct the stage likelihoods from the stage history. It is the one change that turns the forecast from decorative into useful, it takes ten minutes, and almost nobody does it.

Configuring everything before using anything

The commonest by a distance. Someone spends a day setting up pipelines, custom fields, sequences and reports before a single real piece of work has passed through the system, and every one of those decisions is made from a guess about how the business works.

Two weeks of ordinary use will tell you more than any planning session. Configure the minimum, use it properly, and then configure the rest from what you have observed.

Importing everything you have ever held

A file of four thousand rows from three merged sources, imported on the first afternoon because it existed. The result is a system where the records that matter are outnumbered by records nobody has looked at since 2019, and the search results are worse for it permanently.

Import the people you actually deal with. The rest can come later, against the same records, and doing it in that order means the duplicates resolve in your favour.

Adding a custom field for everything somebody mentions

Thirty fields on the first day, of which four get filled in. Empty fields make a record look neglected, and a record that looks neglected stops being trusted, which is a surprisingly expensive consequence of an apparently harmless decision.

Two or three fields that everyone fills in is worth more than twenty that nobody does.

Giving everyone every permission

Usually because somebody was refused something on the first day and raising their role was the fastest fix. It is never lowered afterwards.

Ten minutes on roles and permissions before anybody is invited is worth an afternoon of auditing in eighteen months, and requiring two factor is easier before people are working than after.

Not choosing the region deliberately

It is the one decision at signup that cannot be undone, because your organisation's database is physically created in that region. United Kingdom organisations should choose the European Union.

The remedy if you get it wrong is a second organisation and an import of an export, which takes minutes rather than an afternoon. It is still better to spend the thirty seconds.

The first thing they do is search for a customer they know

Not read the interface, not open settings. They type in the name of the customer they spoke to yesterday, and what comes back decides their opinion of the whole system before they have read anything else on the screen.

Which is a good reason to import the people your team actually deals with rather than everybody who once asked for a price. If the first search returns four plausible records from 2019 and not the one they wanted, you have spent your only easy moment.

They will be asked for a second factor and no one warned them

Two factor sign in is on every plan, including the free one, and an owner can require it for everybody. It is the right setting. It is also thirty seconds of confusion for someone who was told this would take a minute, so tell them before the invitation arrives rather than after, and tell them recovery codes exist and where they should keep them.

The question on day two is always the same

Where do I put this. A voicemail, a price agreed in a car park, a complaint made in passing. What they are really asking is whether the effort of recording it will be repaid, and the answer they want is not a training session.

The answer that works is a rule small enough to remember: anything you promised goes in as a task against the record it concerns, and anything you were told goes in as a note. Two places, no decision tree. People follow rules they can hold in their head while driving.

What makes them stop is double entry, not the software

If the diary is still the real diary and the system is a second copy of it, the second copy is what gets abandoned, and it will be abandoned quietly rather than announced. The moment to watch for is the week someone starts saying they will put it in later.

The fix is never a reminder. It is picking one thing, usually enquiries or bookings, that lives here and nowhere else, and being willing to say that the paper version is no longer the version anyone reads.

They are watching whether the person who chose it uses it

If the owner keeps their own accounts in a private spreadsheet, everyone knows within a week and behaves accordingly. Nothing you configure recovers from that, which makes it the cheapest and most reliable thing on this page: use it yourself, visibly, for the thing you care most about.

The complaint you will get, and what it usually means

Someone will say it takes longer than the old way. Almost always true, for them, because recording something so that another person can use it is genuinely more work than remembering it yourself. The saving lands on whoever would otherwise have had to ask them, which is not the person doing the typing.

Pretending otherwise loses you the argument, because they can feel the minute. Saying that it costs you a minute and saves someone else five is a claim they can test, and within a fortnight they will have been on the receiving end of it themselves.

What they should be told, in one message

Why the change is happening, which one thing must live here from Monday, what will be asked of them at sign in, and who to ask when something is not allowed. Four sentences. A meeting about a system nobody has used yet produces questions no one can answer.