You sign in with your email address and password. If your account is new, you may first be asked to verify your email address — a one-time step that proves the address is really yours, so that notifications and password resets can reach you safely. When your business is registered, that verification email is also how you get in the first time: open its link and it verifies your address, signs you in, and leads you to set your own password — there is no temporary password to copy down. The link works for about an hour. If it has expired, opening it takes you to a page where you can ask for a fresh one; if the email never arrives at all, the sign-in page carries a Resend it link to the same page. If you already have a password but have not verified yet, signing in holds you at the verification page, where you can resend the email — the page answers straight away and the email follows a moment later.
If you forget your password, choose Forgot password on the sign-in page and enter your email address. The system emails you a reset link; follow it to choose a new password, then sign in as usual. The page answers the same way whether or not the address has an account, so it never reveals who is registered. If the email is not reaching you at all, ask your administrator — they can still reset your password for you.
Signing in lands you on the Dashboard, your home page. It is a summary of the business at a glance: headline figures such as the year's revenue and gross profit, what customers owe you, what you owe suppliers that is overdue, and charts of recent trading. Exactly which cards and charts appear depends on which modules your company has switched on — a company without Sales has no revenue cards — so your home page is already personalised to your business before you change a thing. Chapter 2 covers the richer analytics pages (the cockpits) that each module offers; the Dashboard is the front door, they are the control rooms.
The first card on the home page is your welcome card: a greeting with your name and the name of the company you are working in. If you administer the company, it also says how far company setup has got, with a Continue setup link to the next unfinished step (see 0.9). It carries the Take the tour button described next.
The welcome tour. The first time you sign in, a short guided tour starts by itself: eight stops that walk the home page and your welcome card, the sidebar hubs, a module cockpit, a record's 360° page, Documents, the floating setup card, System Setup, and finally your avatar menu. Each stop dims the screen, lights the thing it is talking about, and explains it in a sentence or two — Skip tour if you would rather explore alone, Back and Next if you wouldn't. The tour never clicks anything for you; it only points. Stops you have no access to are skipped quietly, so everyone's tour is exactly as long as their job needs. It runs once; afterwards, Take the tour — on the welcome card and in your avatar menu — replays it whenever you like.
Two fixtures of the top of every screen are worth knowing now: at the right sits the notification bell (see 1.7) and your avatar menu, which holds your profile, your colour theme and the light/dark choice, Take the tour, and Sign out.