The OrderDen user guide

Getting started

Sign up, set up your workspace, invite your team.

Pre-release: what to expect

The free tier is real, there is no paid plan and no support model, and there is no guarantee your data will be preserved — what that means, and what to do about it.

Starter kits

The setup your trade already uses — units, materials with real costs, recipes, terms and wording — installed in one click, with sample data you can remove just as easily.

OrderDen on your phone

Add it to your home screen, take photos straight into the app, and get notifications on a phone with the app closed.

Dashboard

Your customizable widget board and date ranges.

Clients

Company profiles, contacts, addresses, terms and notes.

Items & pricing

The catalog: item numbers, client prices and COGS calculators.

Wholesale and retail pricing

Named price lists with their own minimums and case packs, put a client on one, and every document charges the right price by itself.

Materials, recipes and what things cost

What you buy in, the units you count it in, and the bill of materials that turns both into a cost per unit — with labour, overhead and margin.

Passwords & signing in

Signing in with your email address, choosing a password, and the reset link when you have forgotten it.

Roles, permissions, two-factor and sessions

The five roles, the eight permission flags, two-factor authentication with passkeys, and the devices you are signed in on.

Your data

The full download, and what happens when OrderDen support signs in as you.

Importing your spreadsheet

Load clients and items from a CSV — mapping, preview, duplicates and undo.

Enquiries

A public request form that becomes a quote, with the client matched or created.

Quotes

Priced proposals — send, get accepted, convert to orders.

Orders & shipping

Confirmed work: shipments, tracking, packing lists, invoicing.

Invoices & payments

Bill clients, record payments, track balances due.

Tax

Named rates and groups, per-line tax, exempt clients and the tax collected.

Getting paid online

Take card and US bank payments on a share link with Stripe; fees and refunds.

Credit notes, refunds, returns and write-offs

Correcting a sale without pretending it never happened: what comes back, where the money goes, and the difference between a credit and a bad debt.

Deposits, instalments and final invoices

Half now and the rest on delivery: named payment terms that ask for a deposit, a deposit invoice raised the moment a quote is accepted, instalments on a project, and a final invoice that deducts what has already been paid.

Recurring invoices, cards on file and late fees

Money that arrives without anybody chasing it: retainers and subscriptions billed on a schedule, a card the client leaves on file, charges taken on the due date with a retry ladder behind them, and the late fee that has three guard rails and one exception.

Signatures on quotes

A client signing a quote — typed or drawn — with the record that makes it worth having: who, when, from where, and a fingerprint of the document exactly as it was in front of them.

When an email does not arrive

What a bounced address and a spam complaint mean, what OrderDen does about each, and how to get an address working again.

Reminders, follow-ups and status emails

Chasing an unpaid invoice, nudging an unanswered quote, telling a customer their order shipped — automatically, in your words, and stopping the moment it should.

Statements of account

What a client owes over a period: printed, emailed, scheduled, and on their portal.

Client portal

Give a client an account: everything of theirs in one place, messages on the document, and files both ways.

Documents & sharing

Themes, numbering, print, email, attachments and the client portal.

Spending: purchases and expenses in one list

Everything that went out, on one screen, with a type column saying which kind of record it came from — and why the two records stay two records: receiving a purchase is what gives your materials a cost, and an expense never touches stock.

Vendors & purchasing

The money-out side: suppliers, purchase orders and payments.

Projects: track time, costs and profit on a piece of work

The container a whole piece of work hangs off — its quote, its orders, its invoices, the timber, the hours and the parking — and the one question at the end of it: did that project make money?

Expenses, receipts and profit and loss

The everything-else spend: photograph a receipt and be done, file it under a category that means something at tax time, charge what you spent for a client back to them, and see whether the whole thing made money.

Shipping labels

Buy and print postage from the order: USPS, UPS and FedEx priced side by side, the label kept where you can reprint it, and the parcel marking itself delivered.

Inventory: what is on the shelf, and where

How many there are and which bin they are in — quantity on hand from a movement ledger, allocated against available, bins you can search and pick by, stocktakes, adjustments and valuation.

Making stock: production runs, batches and curing

Turn a recipe into stock: what a run consumes and produces, what a batch cost, batch codes and cure dates, buildable quantity and made-to-order.

Reports

Revenue and margin by client, item and period; backlog aging, cycle time, on-time rate; inventory valuation and stock movements.

Tax time: COGS, inventory value and your expense summary

What the things you sold cost you, worked out from the stock ledger and laid out the way a tax return asks for it — with every figure drillable and the reconciliation printed underneath.

Handing the numbers to your accountant

A period's books as the files QuickBooks and Xero import — sales, credits, payments, bills, expenses, fees and a journal that balances every day — with your own chart of accounts mapped once.

Activity & history

The named trail of every change, org-wide and per record.

Search & lists

Global search, filters, and columns you shape per list.

Custom fields

The two or three things about your business OrderDen does not know — added properly, so they filter, export, import and print rather than living in a notes box.

Settings

Personal Settings, Company Settings and Account & Billing — who sees what, and where everything lives.

Plans & billing

Free and OrderDen: the 50 free invoices, the per-seat price, what unlimited means, and yearly billing.

Account credit

Credit OrderDen has put on your bill: how it comes off your next invoice, and what it is not.

Webhooks & automation

Get told the moment something happens instead of asking: signed deliveries with retries, the polling filter for anything without a public URL, idempotency keys, Zapier and the MCP server.

API reference

The public REST API, included in every plan.