Creating your shop and finishing onboarding

What this does

Creating a shop makes you its Owner and opens a short onboarding flow that sets your shop type, profile, rates, starter services, and first team members. Onboarding gives you sensible defaults; everything it sets can be changed later in Settings.

Before you start

You need an account. One account can own or belong to several shops, so if you run more than one location you create each as its own shop and switch between them from the shop picker.

Have on hand: your shop's legal name, address, phone, email, your hourly labor rate, your parts markup, your shop-supplies percentage, and your local sales-tax rate.

Steps

1. Sign in, then go to Create Shop. Enter a shop name and a short URL slug (the slug becomes part of every address in the app, so keep it simple and lowercase). Submit.
2. Shop type. Choose the type that matches what you service. This sets the words the app uses (Vehicles vs. Devices vs. Aircraft), the default billing behaviour, and which starter services are offered in step 5. If nothing fits, describe your shop in the text box. This choice is made once and is not changeable afterwards; it affects terminology and templates only, never your books.
3. Shop profile. Name, address, phone, email, website. These print on estimates, invoices, and statements, so use what customers should see.
4. Rates. Four numbers: Labor Rate ($/hr), Parts Markup (%), Shop Supplies (%) of labor, and Tax Rate (%). These become the shop defaults; individual lines and canned jobs can override them.
5. Services. A list of canned services pre-loaded for your shop type. Uncheck any you don't offer. Everything here can be edited or added to later under Settings → Canned Jobs.
6. Invite team. Enter an email and pick a role for each person. They receive an invitation email. You can skip this and invite people later from Settings → Team.
7. You're all set. You land on the shop dashboard.

What onboarding does not do

Onboarding does not set up your accounting. The shop can write estimates and work orders immediately, but an invoice will not post to the ledger until you have a chart of accounts and two required accounting settings. Do that next — see Setting up your shop.

Common problems

I picked the wrong shop type. It can't be changed on the shop. The labels it set can be edited one by one under Settings → Shop Profile. If the type is badly wrong, create a new shop with the right type before you enter any customers.

My teammate never got the invitation. Check the address you entered under Settings → Team, and have them check spam. If it's wrong, remove the invitation and invite them again.