Your first 14 days — setup checklist

Everyone asks "where do I start?" after sign-up. This is the sequenced answer: a 14-day plan that gets you from empty tenant to billing real shipments, without burning a week on settings you don't need yet.

Day 1 — Identity & people

• Company profile: Settings → Tenant → fill legal name, address, logo, VAT TRN / tax number. These fields flow into every PDF.
• Format preferences: Settings → Tenant → PDF → pick date format (DMY / ISO), currency style, default basis. Locks in how your documents look.
• MFA enrol for your own admin account. Everyone else can do it on first login.
• Invite 2–3 key users — ops manager, finance lead, sales lead. Don't invite everyone yet; you'll want to shape the app first.

Day 2–3 — Master data

Configure the lookups that drive every dropdown in the app. Skip this and your ops team will complain about "can't find port X".

• Ports & Airports — Settings → Master Data. Seed your top 20 lanes' origin / destination ports and airports. The catalog ships with common codes — you're topping it up for niche trade lanes.
• Commodities — pre-seed the 10–15 you handle most (e.g. General Cargo, Dry Bulk Food, Fashion Apparel, Electronics). Ties into HS codes later.
• Container types — only if you run sea / road container. 20'GP, 40'HC, 40'RF, etc.
• Charge codes — the cost/sell line items on your quotations. Seed: Ocean Freight (OF), Air Freight (AF), Trucking (TR), Documentation (DOC), THC Origin / Destination, BAF, GRI, Insurance, Customs Clearance, Handling.
• Vehicle types — only if you run road freight.

Day 3–4 — Financial backbone

• Currencies — USD, EUR, AED, SAR, INR depending on where you trade. Default is your tenant's home-country currency.
• FX rates — Settings → Finance → FX Rates. Connect to an exchange-rate provider or enter manually. Quotes in foreign currency need a rate to compute the base-currency margin.
• Tax codes — especially if you're in UAE / KSA / India where reverse-charge and place-of-supply rules apply. Tag customers with their tax profile so invoices compute correctly.
• Chart of accounts — if you'll run the built-in accounting. Can defer if Zoho / QuickBooks is your system of record.

Day 4–5 — Operational surfaces

Pick the one you lead with. Most forwarders lead with Forwarding.

• Forwarding: create a test Quotation end-to-end (Your first quotation). Convert it to a Booking. Print the PDF.
• Road: invite your drivers under role DRIVER, hand them the mobile app QR. Configure dispatch board columns.
• WMS: set up your warehouses, locations (bins), and at least one sample SKU. Run a test inbound.

Day 6 — Documents

• PDF Designer: open Settings → PDF Designer. For each editable doc type (Quotation, Booking Confirmation, Invoice, Delivery Order, Arrival Notice, etc.), confirm the defaults look right and add your footer text if needed. Most tenants don't need to customise further — the defaults are enterprise-grade.
• Regulatory documents (MAWB / HAWB / MBL / HBL / Consol Manifest / CMR) are not user-editable — they follow industry standards and render automatically.

Day 7 — Payments & billing

• Payment method: Settings → Subscription → save a Stripe card. Enables auto-charge on your billing day.
• Pick a paid plan before your Trial runs out.

Day 8 — Integrations (optional but high-leverage)

• Zoho Books / QuickBooks if you already run accounting there. Two-way sync of customers, vendors, invoices.
• Stripe for customer card-on-file if you'll collect on public quotes.
• Shopify / WooCommerce if you run fulfilment for e-commerce clients.
• Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace for inbound quote-email ingestion (Smart Quotes).

Day 9–13 — Real data

Start converting real enquiries into real quotations. First ones will be slower; by day 13 you should be at normal speed. Flag anything confusing — tell your CSM or leave it as docs feedback on the article that confused you.

Day 14 — Review

• Confirm all invited users logged in, set up MFA, and are using the right role.
• Check Settings → Subscription that your plan matches your reality.
• Run Settings → Audit Log for the week — spot-check for anything unexpected.
• Close any support tickets you raised during onboarding.

You're live. From here it's operational — see the module sections for deep dives.