Getting started

Signing up takes a minute and no credit card. You get a 30-day free trial on the Basic plan, and you verify your email before your first sign-in. If you came in from a paid plan on the pricing page, setup opens with checkout first, and a link to use the 30-day trial instead. When the trial ends you choose Starter, Basic or Pro.

1. 1Fill in the signup form: the kind of work you do, your company name, your name, email, phone, and a password. You also accept the Terms of Service here.
2. 2Watch for the "Verify your Managolio email" message and click Verify email, then Verify email again on the page it opens. The link is good for 24 hours, and you can send a fresh one from the check-your-email screen.
3. 3Verified in the same browser you signed up in? You go straight into the guided setup, already signed in. Verified anywhere else, on your phone say, the page says your email is verified, and your first sign-in there opens the guided setup.
4. 4Already have an account with that email? The form still says to check your email, and that email tells you how to sign in or reset your password. Nothing new is created. The form never says whether an address has an account, so nobody can use it to find out who uses Managolio.
5. 5Signed up but never verified, or signed up again with a different password? The newest sign-up replaces the earlier one, and only its link works: use the newest email.

The owner walks through seven steps. Your progress is saved as you go, so you can close the tab and pick up where you left off.

1. 1Welcome: what you will have when setup is done.
2. 2Your business: business email, address, an optional license number, and your logo.
3. 3Project stages: the stages a job moves through. Keep the standard ones, or name your own and click Save changes.
4. 4Pricing: your margin floor and the A, B and C grade cutoffs.
5. 5Payment terms: your default payment schedule, plus your warranty if you offer one.
6. 6Getting paid: Venmo, Cash App and Zelle handles, and your check-by-mail details.
7. 7Your team: send invites to your teammates, then click Finish setup and your dashboard opens.

Yes, and it is short. Until you finish, Managolio takes you back to the setup flow, resuming at the step you left. Three steps have to be filled in because they decide what your customers receive: Your business needs a business email and a full street address, Pricing needs grade cutoffs that descend from A to C, and Payment terms needs a schedule whose milestones total 100%. The rest of the steps move on whether or not you do anything on them.

The trade you pick on the signup form tailors your new workspace. Everything it sets is a starting point you can change.

1. 1Which optional modules start on or off, so a handyman does not open the app to a permits pipeline.
2. 2A project number prefix for your job numbers.
3. 3A default payment schedule, for example deposit, start and completion.
4. 4Default workmanship warranty language.
5. 5A first set of price book items priced for your trade.
6. 6A first permit jurisdiction with a checklist, when Permits starts on.

Settings is a modal that opens over whatever page you are on, not a separate section of the sidebar. Its nav has two bands: Personal (Profile, Security, Notifications, Appearance, and Billing for the Owner) and Organization, which only Owners and Operations Managers see.

1. 1Click your name and avatar in the top right, then Settings.
2. 2Or press Cmd+K on Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows and choose Settings.
3. 3Use the "Find a setting..." box at the top of the nav to jump straight to a control by name.
4. 4Organization settings are grouped into Company, Sales & delivery, Money, and Workspace.

Your company details and logo appear on every proposal, contract and invoice your customers see. Owners and Operations Managers can edit them.

1. 1Go to Settings → Business profile.
2. 2Fill in Company, Project number prefix, Business email, Phone, Website, and your street address.
3. 3Decide whether to leave "Show this address on customer documents" on. Some states require your address on a home improvement contract, so check yours before turning it off.
4. 4Check your Business timezone. We set it from your browser at signup, and it drives the dates and times your customers see.
5. 5Add your Review link, for example your Google review page. Managolio asks the customer for a review when their project is completed. Leave it blank to skip those emails.
6. 6Click Save changes.
7. 7Then go to Settings → Branding. On the Logo card, upload your logo as a PNG or JPEG under 2 MB, and click Save logo. A wide logo, about 800×200px, that reads well on white works best.
8. 8No logo? In the same place, turn on "Use company name when no logo" to show your company name instead of the Managolio logo. That switch saves on its own.

Licenses are stored one per state. The license for a job's state is the one that prints on that job's proposals, contracts and invoices, so multi-state contractors never send the wrong number.

1. 1Go to Settings → Licenses.
2. 2Under Licenses & registrations, click Add license.
3. 3Choose the issuing state and enter the license number. Prefix, class, classification, monetary limit, bond amount and expiry are all optional.
4. 4Save, and add another for each state you work in.
5. 5The setup flow asks for one license for your business state. Everything else gets added here.

Subcontractors, Analytics, Claims and Maintenance plans are part of Basic and Pro, so on Starter they stay hidden. Field Ops and Permits are on every plan. All of them are optional modules, so the app stays as simple as your business needs. Which ones start on depends on the trade you chose at signup. Turning one off removes it from the sidebar and from search, and its pages stop being reachable. Your data is kept and comes back if you switch it on again.

1. 1On Starter, move to Basic or Pro first in Settings → Billing. Until then their switches show as locked, marked Included with Basic and Pro.
2. 2Go to Settings → Modules.
3. 3Under Available modules, switch on what you want: Subcontractors, Field operations, Analytics, Permits, or Maintenance plans.
4. 4Claims is the warranty side of the app, and its switch sits with the warranty settings it controls: Settings → Invoicing, under Contract defaults.
5. 5Field operations cannot be turned off while you have Crew members, because Field Ops is where they log their work. Remove them first.

Only the account owner can invite people, resend an invite, or change someone's role. Starter includes 2 team members, Basic 5, and Pro 15; the free trial gets Basic's 5.

1. 1Go to Settings → Team & roles and click Invite member.
2. 2Enter their first name, last name and email, then choose a role: Owner, Operations, Estimator, or Crew. Crew is offered on Basic and Pro.
3. 3Click Send invite. They get a "Set your password" link that works for 7 days, and they choose the password themselves. You never see or set it.
4. 4They show as Invited until they activate. Use the resend button on their row if the email went astray.
5. 5Crew can only be invited on Basic or Pro, with the Field operations module on, since that is their workspace.

Invited teammates get a shorter welcome than the owner, written for their role: what they can do in Managolio, then their own name and phone, and their address, an emergency contact, and the days and hours they usually work. Their progress is saved as they go. Everyone lands on the Dashboard afterwards. For Crew it shows their own day: their schedule, their punch list and their jobs.

The price book is your reusable list of labor and materials with your real costs. Adding an item to an estimate copies its cost onto the line, so editing the price book later never changes estimates you have already built. Owners and Operations Managers edit it; Estimators can see it because the builder prices against it.

1. 1Go to Estimates and click Price book.
2. 2Click Add item and enter a Name, a Category (Labor, Materials, Permits & Fees, Equipment, Disposal, Subcontractors, Contingency, or Other), and a Unit (Each, Linear ft, Sq ft, Hour, Day, or Lump sum).
3. 3Enter your Unit cost, an optional Waste %, and an optional SKU and Vendor.
4. 4Click Add. Your edits are staged, not live yet.
5. 5Click Save changes in the unsaved-changes bar to commit them. Nothing changes for existing estimates either way.
6. 6Turn an item Active off instead of deleting it when you want it out of the picker but kept on old estimates.

Moving over from another tool or off paper does not mean starting from scratch. If a job is already sold and the customer already accepted it, an Owner or Operations Manager can bring it in whole from Projects, using Import project: it creates the customer, estimate, accepted proposal and project in one step, at whatever stage the work is at now, and records any deposits you already collected. No estimate or proposal email is sent, so the customer is not re-pitched a job they already agreed to. Brand-new work still starts the normal way on the Leads page. See Projects & jobs for the full walkthrough.

The search palette jumps you to any page or record without clicking through the sidebar. It only shows what your plan, your role and your switched-on modules allow.

1. 1Press Cmd+K on Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows from anywhere in the app, or click Search... in the top bar.
2. 2Start typing. It searches projects, estimates, permits, leads, contacts, invoices, subcontractors, documents and schedule events (the ones your role can open; the box names what yours covers), and matches page names too.
3. 3Use the arrow keys and Enter to jump straight there. Choosing Settings opens the settings modal in place.

Nothing you entered during setup is locked. Each step has a home in Settings.

1. 1Your business → Settings → Business profile. Your logo → Settings → Branding.
2. 2The license you entered → Settings → Licenses.
3. 3Project stages → Settings → Project stages.
4. 4Pricing → Settings → Estimating, under Job grading.
5. 5Payment terms and your warranty → Settings → Invoicing, under Contract defaults.
6. 6Getting paid → Settings → Payment methods, where you also connect Stripe for card payments and QuickBooks for your books.
7. 7Your team → Settings → Team & roles.
8. 8The automatic emails your customers receive → Settings → Customer emails.

When we release an update while you have Managolio open, the bar across the top says "Managolio was updated" and "This tab stopped refreshing. Reload to see what’s current." Until you reload, the page stays as it is but stops refreshing on its own, so new leads, payments and your teammates’ changes don’t appear. It leads the bar, ahead of anything else there, because nothing else on screen is current until you reload. Choose Reload now. Everything you already saved is kept.

When part of a page can’t be read, it says so in its place, for example "Couldn’t load your estimates. Check your connection." with a Try again button, rather than showing an empty list or a count of 0. Check your connection and choose Try again. Only the reading failed, so nothing you saved has changed. The Leads board says it will try again on its own, and a job’s Tasks tile says "Couldn’t load tasks. Open to try again.", since opening it reads them again.