Setting up your company
Setup is a handful of screens, and most of them are optional until you need them. Do them in this order on your first afternoon, and the rest of Cedar will read from them.
- Business information. Under Settings › Business information, enter your business name, address, contact email and phone, website, time zone and currency. Upload your logo here. The name and the logo print on your quotes, invoices and receipts, and the label you choose appears on invoices.
- Sales tax. Under Sales tax, turn on Charge sales tax on invoices and enter your rate as a percent. New items default to taxable, and each invoice shows its own tax line.
- Banking and payments. Under Banking & payments, connect the account that will receive what your customers pay. Until it is connected, you can still record checks and cash.
- Your team. Give each person their own login and a role. See Settings, team and sign-in.
- Your existing records. Import customers, vendors, cost codes, projects and estimate lines from a spreadsheet, or bring in your QuickBooks files. See the import steps below.
Importing your records
Open Import in the menu. Choose a CSV or Excel file, then Upload and match columns. Cedar shows each column and asks which field it belongs to. Review the preview, which marks every row that needs a fix, and then run the import. Each import is kept as a batch, so you can use Undo to remove everything it added. Re-importing fills in blanks only; it does not overwrite what you have already entered.
The setup guide
Get Started is the setup guide for owners and admins. It checks your progress against your own records, so a step reopens if the thing it tracked is deleted. The required steps are your business profile, your first customers, your first project, expense categories, and one test invoice with one payment. The optional steps are card payments, sales tax and a first quote. It shows "Setup in progress" until the required steps are done, then "Ready to run".