Getting started

What OutcomeDev asks for at sign-up, what it works out on its own, and what the first minute looks like.

An account needs three things, and none of them takes thought:

A business name. Whatever the business is called.
A website. The address of the public site. This is what OutcomeDev reads.
One sentence about what the business does. Plain words are best. "A dental practice with two surgeries in Leeds" tells it more than a description of the software used.

There is no questionnaire and no list to fill in by hand. The sentence plus the website is the brief, and everything else is worked out from them.

What happens in the first minute

The account is provisioned automatically. Within about a minute of signing up:

The account, and its own database, are created.
A session reads the website and the sentence.
It writes the work the business has to keep running onto the desk, as a list of items with calendar dates.
The first pass over that list begins.

You land on the desk with a list already on it. Nothing has been sent to anyone and nothing has been filed anywhere. That first pass is preparation: reading, checking, writing what would go out.

What gets proposed

The proposal is drawn from what the business is, not from a template you have to adapt. In practice that covers:

Statutory filings and their due dates.
Licence and registration renewals, and the expiry dates behind them.
Inspections and the intervals between them.
Payroll and the recurring dates around it.
Certifications that have to stay current.
Client chasing: documents owed to you, and balances left unpaid.
Supplier terms and their renewal dates.
For a new venture, the milestones needed to get it open.

Only what applies. A business with no premises does not get inspection dates.

The proposal is a starting point, not a verdict. For a business that describes itself plainly, it is usually right first time. For a genuinely unusual business it can propose the wrong set. Editing the list is expected, not a failure, and it takes a minute. The full account of this is on What OutcomeDev cannot do.

What the product asks for

After the first minute, the desk keeps working with almost nothing from you. It will ask for two things in the early days:

Connections. Access to the tools the business already runs on. Until a mailbox is connected, the desk prepares work but sends nothing. Add the rest whenever it suits you. See Connections.
Approvals. Where a decision is genuinely yours, the desk writes the step it would take, puts it in front of you, and waits. See the desk.

You can also tell it things directly, at any time, in the chat companion: a date has moved, a client has answered, an item is not needed this year.

It runs on its own

Every business's desk has a daily run. Work happens on that run whether or not anyone is signed in, which is the point: the list is worked because it is on the desk, not because somebody remembered it.

Where to go next

The desk — the Today list, the four counts, and how approving works.
Connections — what to link, and in what order.
Plan and billing — what a plan costs and what it counts.