Using your application

Audience: staff at the client company who use the delivered application day to day. Not the consultant who built it, and not the stakeholder who uses the client portal.

Your application was built for your organisation, so the specific screens, data and terminology are yours. This guide covers what is the same in every application built on this platform.

Signing in

Open the address your provider gave you and sign in with your email and password. The sign-in screen carries your organisation’s branding.

If you cannot sign in, contact whoever administers the application inside your organisation — they can reset access. There is no self-service password reset by default.

Finding your way around

• The left navigation lists the screens you have access to. You will only see screens your role permits — if a colleague can see something you cannot, that is your role, not a fault.
  • ⚙️ If a panel reads “You don’t have access to this data — ask your administrator for read access to …”, that is the application telling you plainly, not an error. It names the thing to ask for. Your administrator can grant it; there is nothing to retry. (How that decision is made is diagrammed in 02 — Build the app, written for whoever configured your app.)
• The bell shows notifications addressed to you or your role.
• Search finds records and documents across the application.

Working with records

A record is one item of your data — a request, a customer, a shipment, whatever your application is about.

Loading a file

If your work includes loading files — a monthly close, a list of cohorts — the Import page in the side rail lists every kind of data your seat may add, whether or not a screen shows a table of it. Choose one, pick a CSV or Excel file, and the columns are matched to the fields by name.

Before anything is written you see what will land:

• How many rows the file has — and, for a large file, that the preview checked the first 1,000: “Checked the first 1,000 of 2,508 rows — Import loads every row.”
• What the de-duplication key will merge. When several rows in the file share the key, they are merged into one record, and the preview says how many: “715 rows share a de-duplication key with another row in the file and would be merged into it.” If they are different things, add a field to the key before you import.

If your seat may add nothing, Import is not on your rail at all.

Pages you do not see

Some pages are for particular people — a market’s own page, say, visible only to seats whose market is that one. A page you may not open is not shown to you anywhere: not in the menu, not in the list of pages to export. Follow a link to one and the app says “This page isn’t available” rather than showing you something else. If a colleague mentions a page you cannot find, it is probably one of those; your administrator can tell you.

If a delete is refused, the message will name what still refers to that record. This protects you: deleting it would leave those other records pointing at nothing. Remove or repoint the references first.

If a save is rejected, you will see an error explaining why. A save that shows no message and no change has gone wrong — tell your administrator.

Notifications

The bell collects what the application wants you to know: something was assigned to you, something needs approval, something unusual was detected, an alert has escalated to you.

You can acknowledge them and mark them read. Your notification preferences control which reach you by email as well as in-app.

If an alert is escalating, acknowledging it stops it climbing to the next person. Acknowledge things you have picked up.

Attention and approvals

Needs attention, in the side rail, lists what your application has flagged for someone to look at, most urgent first. Examples are a weekly payment run that is due, or readings out of their usual pattern. Each item says how soon it wants you (Urgent, Important, When you can) and when it was raised. Press Done when it is dealt with, and it leaves the list for everyone; the application records who closed it. Work from it rather than from memory.

If your application uses approvals, an item waiting on you appears as a task. Opening it shows what you are approving and lets you complete it, which lets the process behind it continue.

What a number means

Some figures on your screens have a small ? next to their title. That is a definition, and it is worth knowing about, because “what exactly is in that number?” is the question that usually stops a conversation about it.

Open it and you get three things:

• The name the number is known by across your organisation.
• What it means, in a sentence written to be checked by someone who is not an analyst — what is counted, what is left out, and any assumption that matters.
• Who owns it. Whoever is named there is the person to tell if you think it is wrong. That is deliberate: a definition nobody owns is a definition nobody corrects.

The marker is only there when somebody has defined the number, and that is information in itself. A figure without one has not been given an agreed meaning yet — the app does not invent a description to fill the gap. If a number you rely on has no definition, that is a reasonable thing to ask for.

The assistant reads the same definitions. Ask it what a figure means and it answers from the definition your organisation wrote, quotes it as written, and tells you who owns it — the same words you get from the ?. If nobody has defined the thing you asked about, it says so plainly before explaining the general meaning, so you always know which of the two you are reading.

⚠️ The definition and the number cannot drift apart. The words you read are the same definition your provider’s tooling checks the screens against: if two charts claimed to show the same measure but calculated it differently, the change would be refused before it ever reached you. So the sentence in the panel is not a description of what the number was once meant to be — it is what it is.

If two numbers should agree and don’t, open both definitions before assuming one is broken. Most of the time they are answering slightly different questions — a different date range, a different set of records — and the definitions say so.

How fresh a number is

Under the title of each page is a short line that tells you how current it is.

• ● Live · updated just now — the page is connected, and it keeps itself up to date. When something is recorded anywhere in the app — by a colleague on another screen, by a system your provider connected, by an import — the figures it affects change on your screen within a few seconds. There is nothing to reload.
• Updating… — a new figure is on its way. The one you can see stays until it arrives; a number never blanks while it refreshes.
• Reconnecting · updated 3 min ago — the connection dropped. The page keeps what it has, checks again every minute, and goes back to live by itself.
• Last updated 14:02 — can’t reach the server — nothing has come through for a couple of minutes. Read the numbers as they were at that time.

The time is the server’s, not your computer’s, so a laptop with the wrong clock still tells you the truth. When you print a page, the line prints as the exact time it was last updated.

A number that changes while you are looking at it says so. It lights up briefly and, for about a minute, shows how far it moved and since when — ▲1 since 14:02. It is green or red only when your organisation has said which direction is good for that figure; otherwise it stays grey, because a rising number is not always good news. If your device is set to reduce motion, there is no flash, only the note.

Some figures come from a file or a scheduled feed rather than from the app itself. Those carry a line underneath:

• As of the upload on 12 Sep 09:14 by J. Smith (hauliers.csv) — the number is only as current as that file.
• Synced 14:00 · hourly — it comes from a scheduled feed, and this is when it last arrived. If the feed has missed more than two of its runs, the line ends — overdue: the figure is older than the feed promises, and whoever looks after the feed should be told.

A figure worked out from more than one feed — a cost per hour, say, from fees synced hourly and viewing synced daily — has one line for each, the oldest first, each naming its feed. The figure is only as current as the oldest of them.

As soon as anything in the app changes that data, the line goes away, because the figure is live again. So a figure without the line is one the app is keeping current itself.

Sending a page to someone who doesn’t use the app

Export this page, in the top bar, makes a PDF of the page in front of you. It isn’t a summary or a redrawing: the app prints the page itself, so the file has the same layout, type, colours and charts you’re looking at. Charts come out sharp at any zoom.

• Your filters come with it. A page filtered to one site exports filtered to that site, and the file says so in words — Site North — where the filter sits on the page.
• It shows what your account can see. Someone who can see more, or less, would export a different file, and the footer of every page says so.
• The times are yours. When the numbers were updated, and when you exported them, are in your own time zone. Dates and times on the page — a visit, an incident — are in the time zone your organisation reports in, and say which zone when it is not yours.
• A long page becomes several pages, and each one is a whole thought. They break between rows of exhibits, so a chart or a table is never split across two pages. On a page that makes a case, a page ends only where one of its reasons begins, and each reason is on the same page as its evidence. When a reason’s evidence is too long for one page, the next page is headed with that reason, marked continued, so every page says what it shows. Nothing is shrunk to squeeze it on: a chart may be drawn a little shorter so a reason fits, but the writing is always the size you see on screen. A page whose reasons sit beside its main chart on screen prints them one under another, after the chart, so that each can start a page of its own. Every page is numbered.
• Buttons don’t print. Paper can’t press anything, so the file leaves out Import, Export CSV,
  • New record, the actions on each row, forms, action buttons, and the ? beside a defined figure — open the live page to read a definition. A table that pages on screen prints every row its box holds, with no page controls.
• A table that scrolls on screen prints the rows that fit and says how many it holds: 12 of 48 rows fit on paper — the rest are in the live page. No row is printed cut in half.
• Content embedded from another website is named in the file, not included.
• If part of the page couldn’t be shown, the file shows it exactly as the page does, and the button tells you so.
• If the page doesn’t finish loading within 45 seconds, you get a message naming what was still loading, never a half-drawn file. Try again in a moment.

Process diagrams

Some screens show a process diagram — boxes joined by arrows, showing how work moves through a stage at a time. It looks like something drawn in a slide deck. It is not: the numbers on it are read from your live data — when the screen loads, and again whenever the data behind them changes — and they are read as you, so you see the same figures you would see anywhere else in the app. If a colleague sees a different number, it is because they can see different records, not because the picture is out of date.

Reading one:

• Boxes are steps. They are colour-coded by what the step is — where work starts, where it finishes, a decision point, a step known to hold things up, and something handled outside your team. A diagram can also mark an outcome, good or bad — a deal won, a deal lost — so that its colour says how things turned out rather than only where the box sits in the flow.
• Arrows are the paths between them. A dashed or differently-coloured arrow is one worth noticing: work going backwards for rework, or a path taken only when something has gone wrong. The arrows differ in line style as well as colour, so they can still be told apart if colour is hard for you to distinguish.
• A number on an arrow or a box says what it is measuring, in words next to it. Read that label rather than assuming. A figure labelled “now” is how many items are sitting at that step at this moment — it is not how many passed through it, which is a different question and usually needs history the app may not keep.
• A dash (—) means the number could not be shown, not that the answer is zero.
• A label on an arrow wraps to fit the gap it sits in. An arrow’s label is measured against the space between the two boxes it joins and wrapped to it, so a long label does not run underneath a box. If one still overlaps, report it.
• A label inside a box does the same, and the box grows to hold it. A step with a long name keeps its text inside its box rather than spilling across its neighbours. The text is wrapped to the box’s width and the box gets taller to fit the lines, so a long step name stays legible instead of overwriting the picture. Box widths are left as the diagram’s author set them — a box that grew sideways could collide with the one beside it.
• Underneath the picture you may see a row of figure names, each with a small ?. Those are the numbers on the diagram that have an agreed definition. Open one and it tells you what that figure counts and who decided it — so a number you are about to repeat in a meeting is one you can check first. A figure with no ? has no agreed definition yet, which is worth knowing before you quote it.

If a diagram shows an error instead of a picture, it is deliberate. A diagram with a step missing, or two steps drawn on top of one another, would quietly tell you something untrue about the process — so the app refuses to draw it at all rather than show you a version with a piece silently left out. Send the message to whoever maintains your application; it names exactly what needs fixing.

Reports

If your provider set up report templates, you can run them yourself: choose the report, set any options, and read or export the result. You do not need to ask anyone to produce these.

Documents

Documents can be uploaded and attached to records, so the paperwork stays with the thing it belongs to. Uploaded documents are searchable.

What your app exchanges data with

Integrations lists the other systems your application works with, in both directions, with whether each one is working:

• What this app reads — systems it fetches from, each with when it last read (“Last read 12 minutes ago”). “Ready, not used yet” means it is set up and has not been used; “Waiting for credentials” means an administrator still has to enter a key.
• What sends to this app — feeds another system posts to it, each with what it loads and when the last delivery arrived (“Last received 3 minutes ago · 400 records”). A delivery the application refused says so — “Last delivery refused … its signature did not match” — as does one that arrived and could not be loaded. “Nothing received yet” means nothing has been sent.

An administrator also sees, under Sender details on a feed, the address the sender posts to and — on request — the secret it signs with, to hand to the vendor. Every reveal of a secret is recorded in the audit log.

Administration (administrators only)

If you are an administrator of the application, you additionally get:

• Users — add a person, disable someone who has left, or remove them entirely. Adding someone, you can leave the temporary password blank: one is generated and shown to you once, to hand to them. It is not stored anywhere it could be shown again, and they can change it after signing in.
• Usage — how much data and resource the application is consuming.

Getting help

Problems with the application itself — something broken, something wrong, something missing — go to whoever provided it. If your organisation uses the client portal, your stakeholder can raise a support request there, which reaches your provider directly with a visible queue rather than disappearing into an inbox.