From workspace setup
to full business operations.

Step 1

Create a workspace and configure it.

When you create an account, the first thing you create is a workspace. A workspace is the top-level container for all your organization's data. It has a name, a logo, a currency setting, a timezone, and a set of global configuration options that shape how all modules behave. These settings cascade through all modules — you define them once and every module respects them.

Workspace currency affects how financial figures are displayed and exported across invoices, budgets, expenses, and reports. Timezone affects how date-based records, leave requests, meeting schedules, and time-sensitive automations calculate and display times. The fiscal year definition affects how budget periods, financial summaries, and performance period comparisons are calculated in the finance and analytics modules.

Most organizations need one workspace. Some run multiple workspaces — a holding company might run one per subsidiary entity, a consulting firm might run one per major client, a franchise might run one per location. Each workspace is a completely separate data environment. Records do not cross workspace boundaries. Row-level security at the database layer enforces this structurally, not through configuration.

Step 2

Invite your team and configure roles and permissions.

Once the workspace is configured, you invite team members. An invitation sends a sign-up email. There is no per-seat charge — every team member you invite is included in the workspace subscription. What scales with your plan is workspace capacity (storage, compute, AI calls, automation runs) — not the number of people in the workspace.

Each user is assigned one or more roles. The Administrator role has access to all 795 permissions. The Viewer role has read-only access across all modules. The Finance Manager role has permissions for invoice management, budget management, expense management, and financial reporting, but does not have access to HR payroll records, vendor management, or project deletion. Roles can be customized by adding or removing individual permissions.

Permissions are checked at both the UI layer (the ProtectedRoute component prevents rendering of unauthorized views, and hasPermission() prevents rendering of unauthorized controls) and the database layer (Supabase row-level security policies reject unauthorized queries regardless of what the frontend sends). The database does not trust the frontend to have applied permissions correctly.

Step 3

Configure the structural data that all modules share.

Before modules produce useful data, the workspace needs structural configuration. This is work for an administrator or implementation specialist, and it shapes how all subsequent data looks and connects. Getting this right early prevents data cleanup later.

Departments and teams are the organizational units that records are assigned to. An invoice is assigned to the Finance department. A project is assigned to the Engineering team. An employee belongs to the HR department. Departments are used for filtering, for budget allocation, for access scoping, and for reporting aggregation. If the department structure is poorly defined, cost center reporting and team-level dashboards will be unreliable.

Chart of accounts is the financial configuration that defines how income and expenses are categorized across the invoice manager, the budget planner, the expense tracker, and the profit-and-loss statement. YBNW One ships with 10 built-in expense categories (Software, Hardware, Travel, Meals, Office, Marketing, Professional Services, Utilities, Training, Other) and supports custom categories for organizations with more specific needs.

Custom fields can be added to any entity type — projects, contacts, employees, vendors, invoices, risks. Custom fields support text, number, date, dropdown, multi-select, and boolean types. They appear in all views for that entity, in filters, in reports, and in CSV exports. Defining custom fields before data entry ensures that the fields are populated consistently and searchable from day one.

Step 4

Enable modules and start building operational data.

Most organizations do not need to configure all 160+ modules simultaneously. A common starting pattern is to begin with the modules that replace the most painful points in the current stack, stabilize those workflows, and then expand to adjacent modules. The shared data layer means that when you do expand, new modules automatically see the existing records.

Starting with project management gives the delivery team a Kanban board with configurable columns (To Do, In Progress, Review, Done — fully customizable with additional columns), full drag-and-drop task management, sprint planning with capacity tracking, milestone management with date-based gates, Gantt-style portfolio timeline, Work Breakdown Structure editing, risk register, and Earned Value Management curves. All task assignees pull from the same employee records that HR uses.

Starting with finance gives the finance team an invoice manager that handles the full lifecycle from draft to paid (with line items, configurable tax rates, payment terms, payment method tracking, and multi-currency support), a budget planner with department and project budget types (and real-time planned vs actual variance), an expense tracker with category assignment and billable flagging, and a profit-and-loss statement that aggregates revenue and expenses by any period.

Starting with HR gives the people team employee records with full profile management, leave management covering 8 leave types (Annual, Sick, Personal, Maternity, Paternity, Bereavement, Unpaid, Remote Work) with automatic day calculation and approval workflow, a recruitment ATS with 8-stage candidate pipeline (Applied, Screening, Interview 1, Interview 2, Assessment, Offer, Hired, Rejected), payroll management with UK tax code support, and attendance tracking.

Step 5

Build dashboards and reports from live operational data.

Once operational data is being created, the reporting layer becomes valuable. The main workspace dashboard is divided into 10 sections — Finance, Portfolio, Management, People, Governance, Operations, Content, Analytics, Communication, Productivity — each of which loads category-specific widgets automatically based on what is in the workspace.

The KPI dashboard allows you to define performance indicators with a name, category (Revenue, Engineering, Operations, People, Quality, or Customer), current value, target, unit (%, $, count, hours, points, days, or multiplier), and trend direction (up-good, up-bad, down-good, neutral). The system calculates status automatically: On Target is current ≥ 95% of target, Near Target is 75–95%, Off Target is below 75%. Each KPI shows a sparkline with 8 historical data points.

The executive dashboard gives leadership a snapshot with four financial KPIs with red-amber-green status, monthly performance charts, attrition trends, NPS trends, headcount views, and operational alerts — all from the operational data the team creates daily. The executive summary feature generates structured period reports with headline, overall status, KPI grid, project status, key highlights, risks, decisions, and next-period focus — printable directly from the browser.

The report builder allows ad-hoc reports from any entity in the database — projects, invoices, employees, vendors, contacts, risks, compliance requirements — with configurable filters, grouping, sorting, and calculated fields. Reports can be scheduled for automated delivery and exported to CSV.

Step 6

Add automation, integrations, and intelligence.

Once core workflows are running on real operational data, the automation and AI layers add compounding value. These are not separate products that need to be connected — they run on top of the same shared data layer.

Automation rules allow trigger-action workflows without writing code. An automation can trigger when a project status changes to "at risk" and automatically create a task for the project manager, send a notification to the team lead, and flag the project in the risk register. An automation can trigger when an invoice becomes overdue and send a reminder to the billing contact, update the invoice status, and escalate to the finance manager if the amount exceeds a defined threshold.

Webhook integrations allow YBNW One to push events to external systems. When a purchase order is approved, a webhook notifies an external ERP. When a customer health score drops, a webhook creates a Slack notification. Incoming webhooks from external systems can trigger automation rules. The webhook system supports custom headers, payload templating, and retry logic with a full request/response log for debugging.

AI assistance operates over the workspace's structured data. Because all the data is in one database, the AI context is richer than what a general-purpose assistant can access from a chat interface. The AI can answer questions about delivery status, budget variance, vendor performance, team workload, and compliance status because those answers exist as structured records in the workspace — not as free-text documents requiring interpretation.