Getting started

OrderDen is a lightweight tool for small businesses that quote, sell, ship and invoice — clients, an item catalog, quotes, orders with shipments, invoices with payments, and internal purchasing, all in one place.

This page is the first ten minutes: from an empty account to an invoice you have actually sent.

Read this first. OrderDen is pre-release: the free tier is the whole product, there is no paid plan and no support model, and there is no guarantee that your data will be preserved. Keep your own copy of anything that matters. See Pre-release: what to expect.

Create your account

1. Go to Sign up and create an account with your name, email and password — typed twice, so a typo cannot lock you out of an account you have not used yet (or continue with Google when enabled).
2. Enter your company name, country and currency — this creates your workspace. New documents are priced in that currency; the country sets sensible defaults for number formatting and timezone. Everything you make belongs to this workspace and is completely isolated from every other company using OrderDen.

Straight into the app

Signing up lands you on your dashboard. There is no setup wizard to sit through: an empty workspace works, and the two things a wizard used to ask for are waiting in Company Settings → Workspace whenever you want them.

Starter kits. Pick what your business makes — candles and soap, jewellery, ceramics, textiles, woodworking, food and drink, print and art, a trade, or something else — and install its starter kit in one click: the units, materials with typical costs, recipes, spend categories, payment terms and document wording that trade already uses. It is a working setup, not a demo: the wax costs what wax costs and the deposit terms are the ones joiners actually offer. Installing one is deliberate, so a workspace only ever fills up because somebody asked it to.

Sample data. Tick Also install sample data with the kit and you also get three sample clients with a quote, an order, an invoice, a production run and an expense, so every screen has something real on it while you look round. One button removes them again, and OrderDen remembers exactly which records it created — see Removing the samples below.

Wording. Choose whether the app talks about Materials and Batches, Projects, Labour and Deposits, or plain Items and Production. Nothing your customers see changes — a quote is a quote on anybody's letterhead — and neither do any of the API's field names.

Signing in afterwards

You sign in with the email address you signed up with — OrderDen has no usernames, so there is nothing else to remember. Forgotten the password? Forgot your password? on the sign-in page emails you a link to set a new one. See Passwords & signing in.

The setup checklist

The dashboard carries a checklist until it is finished or you dismiss it. Eight things, in the order they matter:

1. Your name, address and logo — what prints at the top of every document.
2. Set your tax rate — one is enough to start; stack state, county and city later in Taxes.
3. Add your first product or material — a starter kit fills a set of them in for you if you install one.
4. Add your first client — a name and an email is enough.
5. Raise your first quote or invoice (a quote if you sell quoted work).
6. Get paid online — connect Stripe and every invoice carries a Pay button.
7. Add a deposit term — half up front is what stops you funding somebody else's run.
8. Invite someone — shown only on plans with more than one seat.

Most steps tick themselves off by watching your data, so they are a mirror rather than a wizard's memory: add a client and the step ticks; delete your only client and it comes back. Steps that are a decision rather than a task — connecting Stripe, say — have a Not for me so the list can reach done honestly. The ✕ in the corner puts the card away for good.

Opening balances: where you start from

Nobody opens a business on the day they open an app. Two forms bring your existing position in, and both are worth ten minutes:

• Opening stock (Inventory → Opening stock) — count what is on the shelf and say what it cost. Every valuation, cost-of-goods figure and low-stock alert from then on is right.
• Unpaid historical invoices (Invoices → Add unpaid historical invoice) — a client, an amount and two dates, no lines. It ages on your debtors report and takes payments like any other invoice, and is deliberately kept out of your revenue figures and never counted against the free 50 invoices, because the sale happened somewhere else.

Removing the samples

Company Settings → Workspace lists everything the starter kit installed and has one button to take it back out. Two things stop a record being removed, and both are shown before you press anything:

• You edited it. Renaming the sample material to your own supplier's product means you have adopted it. It is yours now.
• Something real points at it. A sample item on a genuine invoice, a sample client with a real order, a spend category with actual expenses filed under it.

If anything is in the way, nothing is removed and the list says what to deal with first — a half-removed workspace is worse than either state. Your document wording, payment terms and the two setup answers are settings rather than records, so they always stay.

Make your documents yours

Before the first invoice goes out, spend two minutes in Company Settings → Profile:

• Upload your logo — it prints top-left on every quote, order and invoice, in emailed PDFs and on shared portal pages.
• Fill in your address, phone / email / website and tax ID (EIN, VAT number…). They print in the document header; the email is also where replies to documents you send land.

Email works out of the box: documents and invitations are delivered by OrderDen on your behalf ("Your Company via OrderDen"). Connect your own mail server later under Company Settings → Email delivery if you want them to come from your own address. See Settings.

Invite your team

OrderDen is multi-user. In Account & Billing → Members & invitations you can:

• Invite people by email. Send invite creates the invitation and emails the link in one go; they join with their own login, carrying whatever access you gave the invitation. If the email can't be sent, the invitation still exists — copy its link, or send it again from the pending list.
• Pick a role — owner, admin, member, accountant (read-only over the money, and uses no seat) or viewer (read-only, costs hidden) — and adjust the permission flags for the two roles that take them.
• Rename the organization, resend or cancel invitations, change access, and remove members.

Somebody who packs and ships does not need to see what a jar costs you, and a bookkeeper should not cost you an upgrade at year end. Both are a couple of clicks: Roles, permissions, two-factor and sessions.

Everyone on the team sees the same clients, documents and settings, minus whatever their access hides. Personal preferences — your dashboard layout, list columns, and the background and accent colours you run the app in — are saved per person, as is your two-factor setup.

Plans

Both plans are the whole app, including the public REST API. They differ in two things only:

• Free — your first 50 invoices, counted over the life of the workspace rather than per month, on one seat. Every workspace starts here, with no card and no trial clock.
• OrderDen — $19 a month for the first person and $5 for each one after, with everything unlimited.

Nothing else is counted on either plan. Quotes, orders, credit notes, purchases, expenses, clients, items, stock, projects, time and attachments are unlimited whichever plan you are on, and invoices you import as history never touch the free 50 — bring your whole debtors ledger in on day one.

The owner buys, switches or cancels in Account & Billing — monthly or yearly (ten months for twelve). Billing recurs from the day you subscribed, not the 1st. Details in Plans & billing.

Finding your way around

The sidebar (bottom bar on phones) reaches every area. Dashboard sits at the top and Reports at the bottom; between them, four headed groups:

The destinations inside the groups go by whatever names your vocabulary gives them — a candle maker's Items are Products and their Production is Batches. The group headings themselves do not change: every trade sells and every trade buys. See Settings to pick your words.

Two of those rows cover more than one list, and open on a strip of sections:

• Payments & credits — Payments, the money that came in, and Credit notes, the money handed back. A credit note is still its own numbered, printable document; it just no longer needs a row of its own.
• Spending — an overview, then Purchases (what a supplier billed you) and Expenses (everything else that went out on a receipt).

Inventory is the stock side of the catalog gathered in one place: what you count, what is low, opening stock, stocktakes, valuation and the movement ledger — see Inventory & stock. The catalog itself stays under Items.

The sidebar footer holds the three settings areas — Personal Settings, Company Settings and Account & Billing — with Sign out kept apart underneath. See Settings.

Two more things worth knowing:

• The search bar at the top finds anything by name or number — see Search & lists.
• A common flow is quote → order → shipment → invoice → payment, each step one click from the previous document — but only the ones you need. A quote can go straight to an invoice, or become a project billed for hours and materials over several invoices; the order stage is for something to make and ship. Start with Clients and Items, then make your first Quote.

Put it on your phone

OrderDen installs onto a home screen without an app store: a card on your dashboard offers it on Android, and on an iPhone it is Safari's Share → Add to Home Screen. It opens without an address bar, gets its own icon, and puts Add an expense one long-press away.

Everywhere the app takes a file it offers Take photo first, straight into the back camera, and shrinks the picture before it is sent. See OrderDen on your phone.

Bringing your data with you

Coming from a spreadsheet, or a webstore's export? Don't retype it. The Import button on the Clients and Items lists reads a CSV, maps its columns onto OrderDen's fields, shows you the rows before writing anything, and can undo the whole run in one click. It is the quickest way to go from an empty workspace to a real one: see Importing your spreadsheet.