What the onboarding wizard asks (and why)

When this article is for you

You just signed up and want to know what each wizard step does before you click through. Or you've already finished onboarding and you're trying to figure out which setting controls what. Either way, this article maps every wizard field to where the setting lives later (Settings → …) and what it actually changes downstream.

If you haven't signed up yet, see sign up and add your company for the signup flow itself; this article is about what happens after you've created the user account.

Why the wizard is so short

We've cut every field we don't strictly need. No phone number at signup. No industry. No address. No VAT ID (until checkout for a paid plan). No "how did you hear about us" survey. The principle is well-tested: every field at signup is a place users drop off, and the cost of getting a field wrong (you'd need to come back and fix it later) is higher than the cost of asking for it later when it actually matters.

The four fields the wizard does ask for are the ones the rest of the app cannot work without: a company name (for export covers and tax-advisor handoffs), a country (for VAT-rate suggestions in the extraction pipeline), a base currency (for the totals view), and the email verification step (because we can't email you receipts and notifications until we know the address works).

The 4 steps

Step 1 — email verification

A 6-digit code arrives from [email protected]. Type it on the next screen. The code expires after 15 minutes; click Resend if you missed the window. About 1 in 30 first-time signups land in spam because the sender has no reputation with your inbox yet — check there before requesting a resend.

If you signed up with Google, this step is skipped entirely. Google has already verified your email, so we trust their assertion and let you straight through to step 2.

The verified email becomes your account's primary contact for: billing receipts, tax-advisor flag notifications, 30-day inactivity reminders, and password-reset links. You can change it later from Settings → Account → Email, with another verification round on the new address.

Step 2 — company name + country

The company name appears on every export header (year-end JSON, tax-advisor exports) and is visible to invited tax advisors. Pick the legal name as it would appear on your invoices, or your trading name. You can edit it later from Settings → Company → Name.

The country is the one most people overthink. It drives VAT-rate suggestions in the extraction pipeline only:

• A German company gets 19% / 7% suggested as the default rates when the AI extracts an invoice with no detected VAT rate.
• A French company gets 20% / 10% / 5.5%.
• An Irish company gets 23% / 13.5% / 9% / 4.8%.
• A Cypriot company gets 19% / 9% / 5%.

That's it for what country does. It does not drive data residency — your data is stored in Frankfurt regardless of which country you pick. See where is my data stored for the residency story. It does not affect billing (we bill in EUR from a Cyprus entity regardless of your country). It does not unlock or restrict features.

If you pick the wrong country, the consequences are limited: the VAT-rate suggestions are wrong, which the AI extraction usually corrects when it reads the actual VAT rate printed on the invoice. You can still pick correctly from Settings → Company → Country later.

Step 3 — base currency

The base currency is the currency you want your books reported in. Most EU users pick EUR; UK users pick GBP; users billing internationally pick whichever currency they actually file taxes in.

For any invoice that arrives in a non-base currency, we auto-convert at the European Central Bank's reference rate on the invoice date. Both the original amount and the converted amount are stored — so you see "USD 1,200 = EUR 1,110.30 at the 2026-05-15 rate" rather than just the converted figure. See multi-currency and live ECB rates for the conversion mechanics.

You can change base currency later from Settings → Company → Base currency. Historical invoices keep their original amounts and conversions intact (we don't retroactively re-convert at the new base currency). Only future invoices convert to the new base.

Step 4 — invite teammates + tax advisor (optional)

You can skip this and add people later. If you're a solo founder, that's probably what you want — there's no team to invite yet.

If you do want to add people now:

• Teammates (Settings → Team later): you pick a role at invite time (Owner / Admin / Bookkeeper / Member / Viewer). See companies, users, and roles for what each role does. Teammates count against your plan's seat limit; the Free plan caps at 1 user, so you'd upgrade before adding a teammate.
• Tax advisor (Settings → Tax Advisor later): separate flow, separate audit trail, read-only by default, doesn't consume your seat count. See invite your tax advisor. This is the right path for sharing with an accountant or Steuerberater.

The wizard combines both invites into one screen for convenience, but under the hood they're two distinct paths with different scopes.

What happens after the wizard

You land on the Dashboard with Free plan · 10 documents/month at the top. The app suggests three next steps:

• Upload your first document (drag-and-drop, the file picker, or your phone camera). See upload via the web.
• Enable 2FA before doing anything sensitive. See enable 2FA.
• Set up email forwarding so future invoices arrive automatically. See set up email forwarding.

You can skip those too. The free plan stays free as long as you stay under 10 documents/month; there's no clock ticking.

Edge cases

I picked the wrong country. Settings → Company → Country. Change it; the next AI extraction will use the new country's VAT-rate defaults. Past extractions stay as they were — they have specific VAT rates already extracted from the actual invoices, so the suggestion-defaults are irrelevant to them.

I want my books in USD but my address is EU. Country = EU country (for VAT-rate hints, especially helpful if you receive EU invoices); Base currency = USD. Both fields are independent and there's no "must match" rule.

I'm setting up multiple companies. Finish the wizard for the first one, then go to Settings → Companies → Add company. Same user, multiple separate company workspaces, each with its own wizard run (though the wizard remembers your user-level preferences and pre-fills sensibly). See companies, users, and roles for the multi-company model.

I want to add a VAT ID for reverse charge. Skip in the wizard; add it later at checkout when you upgrade to a paid plan, or directly in Settings → Company → VAT ID. The VAT-reverse-charge logic on our invoice depends on the VAT ID being set, but doesn't require it at signup. See VAT reverse charge for EU businesses.

I made a typo in my company name. Settings → Company → Name. Edit freely; past exports keep the name they had at export-time (we don't retroactively re-name an export's header).

The wizard asked for nothing about my industry — should I pick one? There's no industry field. We don't ask because we don't have a feature that depends on it. If something on your account ever does (e.g. industry-specific category suggestions), we'd add the field at that point.

I closed the browser tab in the middle of the wizard. You can resume — sign in again and the wizard picks up where you left off. The user account is created at email verification (step 1); steps 2–4 just configure the first company. If step 2 was incomplete, signing back in re-presents step 2.

Related

• Sign up and add your company — the path before this wizard
• Companies, users, and roles — the model behind step 4
• Multi-currency and live ECB rates — what base currency does downstream
• Where is my data stored? — what the country setting does not affect