1. Your first day

The goal of the first day is not to explore the product. It is to get your people in and have the dashboard start telling you something true. Twenty minutes, in this order.

This chapter is the walkthrough. Work down it in order — each step unlocks the next. The dashboard says so plainly while it is still empty, and switches to reporting on your day once your people are in and you have logged the first conversation.

1.1 Pick a preset

The first thing you are asked at onboarding is which preset to apply. A preset is not a colour scheme. It does four things at once:

• switches on a set of modules — so your navigation is not full of modules you will never use
• creates custom fields that make sense for your work
• relabels the interface — "Contacts" becomes "People" or "Members", "Deals" becomes "Personal projects" or "Applications"
• seeds pipeline stages, for the presets that have their own, as long as no deal sits on your pipeline yet

Five presets exist today.

Two things worth knowing before you choose.

A preset is a starting point, not a cage. Everything it sets can be changed afterwards, one item at a time, in Settings. Picking the wrong one costs you nothing.

Presets are additive. Applying one switches modules on; it does not switch other modules off. If you have already configured something, a preset will not take it away, with one exception: pipeline stages. A preset with its own stages replaces yours only while no deal uses them, and a deal in the recycle bin counts, because it can be restored and needs its stage to come back to. If any deal is there, your stages are kept and the preset tells you so.

If none of the five fits, pick Personal. It gives you the smallest possible product, and you add what you need from there. That is the honest default: it is far easier to recognise something missing than to notice something superfluous.

1.2 Switch modules on and off

Settings → Modules.

Sixteen modules exist. Each is a set of pages and features that appears in the navigation when switched on and disappears when switched off:

Email · Telegram · Sales · Marketing · Support · Pastoral care · E-commerce · Review reminder · Events · Recruitment · Donors · Approvals · Conversations · Invoicing · Booking · Courses

The core of the product — contacts, companies, activities, reminders, tasks, relationship health, tags, custom fields, search, import — is never a module. It is always there, on every plan, for everyone.

Switching a module off never deletes anything. This is worth repeating because it is what makes experimenting safe: switch something on, look at it, switch it off again, and everything you made while it was on is still there when you come back.

For most modules, switching off only changes your navigation. Three also stop work that runs on its own, without anyone opening a page:

• Review reminder stops sending review requests and reminders, including the ones your automations would send. It does not catch up on everything when it comes back on: only orders delivered in the last 30 days are asked, and a request stops being reminded 30 days after it was sent.
• Telegram notifications stop.
• Booking closes your public booking pages, so nobody can book through them.

So before you switch one of these three off, make sure you want that work to stop too.

1.3 Get your people in

Four ways in, in order of how many people you have.

Type them. Contacts → New contact. Fine for the first twenty. The form warns you if the name or email looks like someone already in the database, so you do not accidentally create a second copy of a person you already know.

Import a spreadsheet. Import in the main navigation takes a CSV file or an Excel workbook (.xlsx); from a workbook, only the first sheet is read. If your people are in Google Sheets or Airtable, export the sheet as CSV (File → Download → CSV in Google Sheets; view menu → Download CSV in Airtable) and upload that. From another CRM, export to CSV. This is the normal path when you are moving in.

Photograph a business card. Contacts → Scan card. Take a photo of a card and the contact is created from it, with an automatic greeting drafted for you. Useful after an event when you come home with a stack of cards. This one costs a little on our side, so it is limited by plan and by a monthly quota.

Let them arrive on their own. Once you are running, contacts create themselves — from a public booking, a web form on your site, an inbound email, a Telegram message, or the API. You do not type those in; they appear.

1.4 Log one conversation

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that makes the product work.

Open any contact and log an activity — a call, a note, a meeting, a message. There is a one-line "catch-up" box for exactly this: you spoke to someone, you write one line, you move on.

Why it matters: logging an activity is what tells the system you touched this person. Relationship health, the neglected list, the over-contact warning, the whole spine of the product described on the first page of this manual — all of it is computed from your activity log. A CRM with no activities logged is an address book.

The good news is that most of it fills itself in once you are running. Telegram messages, inbound email captured by BCC, and bookings all land as activities automatically. What you have to do by hand is the offline stuff: the phone call, the corridor conversation, the coffee.

1.5 Look at the dashboard

Go to the home page. If you have logged anything at all, it should now be telling you two things:

• who you are neglecting — the people who have gone quiet longest, oldest first
• what is due today — reminders and tasks

Click a task to open it where you deal with it: on the contact's page if it has one, otherwise in your task list, with that task marked. The CRM City name at the top of the menu always brings you back here.

That is the product doing its job. Everything else in this manual is optional depending on your work; this part is not.

1.6 Three settings worth doing now

Email to your contacts. Settings → Email to your contacts. CRM City does not send your email to your contacts from its own account: that goes through your own email account, once you can connect it — and connecting one is not available yet. Until then nothing is emailed to your contacts from the product, and every attempt tells you so. Keep writing from your own mailbox, with the BCC address from chapter 5.6, so the conversation still lands on the contact.

Your name and sending identity. Account. If you are going to send email from inside the product, you need at least one business card — a sending identity with a display name. One person can have several ("Personal", "Pastor", "Marketing") and pick which one to send as. Without one, the email composer has nothing to send from.

Your terminology. Settings → Presets (or terminology). If your organisation says "members" and the screen says "contacts", change it. It sounds cosmetic. It is not: people stop using software that speaks a language they have to translate in their heads every time they look at it.

1.7 If money is part of your work, make one invoice now

Only applies if the Invoicing module is on. Create one draft invoice, a real one if you can: it is numbered in sequence (INV-0001, INV-0002…), and a draft you delete does not give its number back, so a test invoice leaves a gap in your numbering. It gets a public link your client can open without any account. Walking this path once, before money is on the line, means the first real invoice is routine instead of an experiment. Chapter 8 — Money has the full story, including what "Send" does and what happens when an invoice has no contact email.

What to read next

Chapter 2 — People covers everything about the records themselves. Chapter 3 — Attention covers the part that makes this different from an address book, and is the one to read if you only read one more.