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The order to set LedgerOS up in, and roughly how long each step takes.
You can be running real work in an afternoon. The order below matters, because a few early decisions are annoying to change once there's data sitting on top of them.
The order
1. Set up your firm — name, address, timezone, and the terminology settings. Ten minutes, and two of those settings are worth thinking about now rather than later.
2. Invite your team — get people in early so they're configuring alongside you rather than inheriting your choices.
3. Decide your statuses and pipelines — the single highest-leverage hour you'll spend. Your boards, filters, portal messaging, and automations all sit on this.
4. Bring your clients in — spreadsheet or QuickBooks Online. Define your custom fields first if your data carries anything you want to keep.
5. Set up your client portal — branding and address. Do it before you invite a client, not after.
6. Run one piece of work end to end — one real client, one real job, all the way through. This is where you find out what your pipeline is missing.
7. Then scale it — templates, recurring schedules, and automations, once you know what your process actually is.
What to think about before you type anything
Two decisions are worth five minutes of thought.
What do you call a container of tasks? LedgerOS defaults to Job, and you can change it to Project, Matter, Engagement, or Work. It applies across the whole app.
How do you write individual client names? First Last or Last, First. This is firm-wide and composes every individual client's display name, so switching later means every name changes at once.
Both live in firm settings and both are easier to set now than to revisit at ninety clients.
What you don't need to do yet
Skip these until you've run real work through the system:
- Templates. Build them once you know your process rather than encoding a guess.
- Automations. Same reason. Automating the wrong process just does the wrong thing faster.
- Recurring schedules. Get one month right by hand first.
- Every custom field you can imagine. Add them when you miss them.
The firms that stall in setup are the ones trying to configure everything before doing anything.
A realistic first week
Day one — firm settings, team invitations, statuses and pipelines.
Day two — import clients, check the results, set up the portal.
Day three — pick one real client and take one real piece of work all the way through, including the portal side. Fix what annoyed you.
Rest of the week — bring the rest of your live work across, in whatever order matters. Templates and recurring schedules come after.