Guided Setup

Last verified against the codebase: 2026-08-30.

Guided setup is how a tenant sets itself up. It has three parts: the blueprint interview (“Set up my business”, also called MSP in a Box), which provisions an MSP’s whole operating model from a short interview and can be re-run at any time; the Getting Started checklist, a persistent hub in both the MSP and organization portals whose steps complete themselves from live data, lock behind plan tiers with an upgrade path, and trigger nudge emails when a workspace stalls; and guided tours, short in-app walkthroughs reachable from the checklist.

What it is

The blueprint interview turns six answers into a working service desk, catalogue and document set for an MSP, and the Getting Started checklist tracks everything else a workspace still needs to do, for MSPs and organizations alike. Neither is a one-shot wizard: the interview can be re-run to layer a second business model on later, and the checklist stays in the navigation until you dismiss it.

Concepts

The web app renders the wizard (BusinessSetupWizard), the hub (GettingStartedHub) and the tour overlay (components/tours).

Roles and permissions

The role hierarchy is platform administrator > MSP administrator > MSP technician > organization administrator > power user > CUSTOMER`. MSP technician outranks organization administrator. Every floor below is “this role or higher”.

Tenant scope is not a role check. The blueprint provisions the MSP’s own organization (its earliest-created one); client organizations are separate accounts and are only touched through client defaults. A client checklist is resolved against the client’s tier and managed status, whoever is viewing.

Walkthroughs

First login as a new MSP admin

1. After signup and the plan interstitial, the first MSP admin to sign in is sent to /msp/onboarding. The sidebar keeps sending you back there until the wizard is completed.
2. Welcome lists the steps. Company Profile captures business email, phone, website and the legal address (this is also the sender identity’s address). Your Plan shows the plan chosen at signup, read-only, with an in-place upgrade. Billing & Tax captures payment terms, accepted payment methods and sales tax, and can be skipped (“Skip for now — I’ll set this up later”).
3. Your Setup embeds the blueprint interview described next. Its finish button is Finish. Below it, Skip this — I will set things up myself moves on without provisioning anything.
4. Complete sets the onboarding flag and hands you to /msp/getting-started.

Set up your business from a blueprint

MSP portal: Settings → Set up my business (/msp/settings/business-setup), or the Set up your business in one go step at the top of Getting Started.

1. Pick. Six cards. Select one and press Continue, or open a card’s detail view to read who it is for, what you get, its interview defaults, and the full plan it would produce from those defaults (item counts per area). If you have applied a blueprint before, the pick screen says which and when, and reminds you that applying another only adds what is missing.
2. Interview. Every answer is pre-filled for the blueprint. The questions, their options and what each changes are in Configuration below. Choosing Canada sets CAD, choosing the United States sets USD; you can override the currency to EUR. Two switches close the interview: copy the agreement pack, and apply this standard to new clients.
3. Review. “Here is exactly what we will set up” lists every item, grouped by area, with a running count of items and areas. Skip this turns an optional area off (Add back restores it); business hours and queues have no switch. Notices appear above the list. An area whose management screen your plan does not include is flagged with the capability name and the tier that carries it.
4. Apply. Progress copy tells you it is safe to leave: a later run picks up where this one stopped. A full Managed apply is roughly 800 rows and takes a few seconds.
5. Done. “We created N things for you. M were already there and were left alone.” Each area shows N created, already in place, or Could not be set up — try again. If any area failed, a notice says running setup again will finish it. The finish button opens Getting Started (or returns to Settings when launched from there).

Layer a second blueprint later

Open Settings → Set up my business again, pick the new blueprint and run the interview. Everything that already exists under the same name is left alone and counted as already in place; only the new blueprint’s additional queues, categories, templates, runbooks and services are created. The setup status records the newest blueprint as current and appends the run to its history.

Work the Getting Started checklist

MSP portal: Getting Started (/msp/getting-started). Organization portal: Getting Started (/org/getting-started). The navigation entry carries the current percentage; the dashboard shows a card with the next steps and a View all link.

1. The page opens on a progress ring and one chip per group. Clicking a chip scrolls to that group and expands its first incomplete step.
2. Expand any step to read why it matters, what you’ll need and the time estimate.
3. Set it up opens the page that does the work. When you come back the step has ticked itself if the detector sees the result.
4. Show me appears on steps with a tour, in the organization portal only.
5. Mark done appears on manual steps; Undo reverses it. Skip removes a step from your denominator; a skipped step shows Undo too.
6. A locked step shows “Upgrade required” or the tier name and price, and an Upgrade button that opens the in-place upgrade when the account can self-serve.
7. A managed step (organization portal, managed clients only) shows “Handled by your provider” and no actions.
8. At 100% a banner offers Dismiss. Dismissing hides the navigation entry, badge and dashboard card and stops nudges. The hub page then shows “This checklist is dismissed from your navigation” with Restore it.

Take a tour

1. On the organization hub, expand Invite your team, Create your ticket queues or Connect your support email and press Show me.
2. You land on the target page with ?tour=<id> appended. The rest of the screen dims, the control to click is outlined, and a popover explains it with Back, Next and Done. Esc or ✕ ends the tour; ← and → move between steps.
3. If the target has not rendered yet the runner polls for it for about five seconds, then shows the popover in the centre of the screen. Finishing or closing the tour removes ?tour= from the address.

Review a client’s checklist as its provider

Open Clients → client → Onboarding. Below the tracker the client’s own Getting Started checklist is shown with the Onboard this client group only you can see, and the three provider-owned steps become actionable.

Configuration

The interview

Blueprint defaults: solo — Just me, business hours, hourly + blocks, $125; managed — 6–15, extended + on-call, per user + per device + hourly + projects, $150; co-managed — 2–5, extended, hourly + blocks + projects + flat, $175; security — 6–15, 24/7, per user + per device + flat + projects, $185; vcio — Just me, business hours, flat + projects + hourly, $250, apply to new clients off; blank — 2–5, business hours, hourly, $150, agreements and new-client defaults off. Every blueprint defaults to Canada, CAD and America/Toronto.

What each blueprint selects

Counts are before the team-size cap is applied.

The shared catalogue behind them: 11 queues (Triage, Service Desk, Escalations, Field Dispatch, Projects, Alerts / NOC, Security, Onboarding & Offboarding, Procurement, Change Requests, Billing & Account Management), 6 teams, 15 three-level category groups, 27 canned responses, 14 request templates, 12 automations, 18 runbooks and policies, 7 project templates, and default status workflows per ticket type. Canned responses and request templates vary per blueprint and are listed in the review screen.

Service-level tiers

Minutes are business minutes unless the row is 24/7.

Rates, packages and pricing

• Rate card: Junior 0.6×, Technician 1.0×, Senior 1.4×, Principal 2.0× of your hourly rate, rounded to whole dollars; cost rate 60% of bill rate; written against every service the run activates.
• Block packages: 10 h at 10% off (valid 90 days), 20 h at 12% off (90 days), 40 h at 15% off (180 days); priced from the Technician rate, whole dollars; a 15% platform fee is recorded on each.
• Catalogue prices: the platform’s benchmark price per SKU, converted from CAD to your currency using the platform’s rate table, rounded to whole dollars, and never below the platform cost price.
• Hardware pricing profile: Standard, 1.0× multiplier, 3% FX buffer, round up to .99. Created only if the account has none.
• Operating currency: the account’s default currency is switched to your answer only when the catalogue was actually converted. With no usable rate, prices stay in CAD, the account is left alone, and the review screen says so.

What gets written, and how a re-run behaves

Creating a new default SLA policy clears the default flag on any existing policy in the organization; a policy that already exists is not touched.

Client defaults

Stored when “Apply to new clients” is on. Applied in the background when a client is created from the client wizard and when clients are bulk-imported from QuickBooks Online. The client receives, in its own organization: business hours for the stored coverage, one year of holidays for the stored country, the stored queues, the stored SLA tier as its default policy, and the stored category groups. Fourteen areas are excluded by an explicit list: currency, teams, status workflows, canned responses, request templates, automations, service catalogue, rate card, block packages, pricing profile, agreements, runbooks and project templates. A failure is logged and does not fail client creation.

Installation prerequisites

Checklist state, nudges and snapshots

Nudge recipients: the organization’s primary active organization administrator, or for an MSP account the primary active MSP administrator in the MSP’s own organization. An MSP’s own organization is excluded from the organization scan so it is nudged about the checklist its portal actually shows. Each run scans up to 500 subjects per scope.

Plan tiers

Guided setup carries no plan gate. The interview, both checklists, tours, nudges and snapshots are available on every tier, including Free, and a blueprint creates its full set on every tier.

Three areas the blueprint creates have management screens that are gated. The review screen flags them before you apply, with the tier that lifts the gate and the in-place upgrade:

Individual checklist steps lock the same way. A locked step shows the tier, its monthly price and, where the account can self-serve, an Upgrade button; ticking a locked step through the API returns the same upgrade envelope.

MSP tiers: Free, Starter, Growth, Scale, Enterprise. End-customer tiers: Free, Essentials, Professional, Business, Enterprise. Locked steps never count against your percentage.

Limits and known behaviour

• The interview is an MSP feature. A directly-subscribed organization has no blueprint interview; it has the checklist, tours and nudges.
• Business hours are the one area that is overwritten. Re-running with a different coverage answer rewrites the seven day rows. Every other area only adds.
• Names are the match key. Rename a provisioned queue, policy or template and a re-run creates a fresh one under the catalogue name. A queue you deactivated is re-activated by a re-run.
• Team size trims from the end of the blueprint’s list. The Security blueprint keeps its Security board inside the cap; routing rules, category defaults and request templates that pointed at a dropped queue fall back to the default queue or to no queue.
• Coverage caps the ladder. A 24/7 blueprint answered “business hours” ships Bronze only, and a notice says the 24/7 tier was left out.
• Plan gates never block creation. Service levels, business hours and project templates are created on Free; only their management screens are gated.
• Countries and holidays. The interview offers Canada and the United States. Any other two-letter code accepted by the API produces zero holidays rather than a guessed calendar.
• Currency. CAD, USD and EUR in the interview. Without a usable rate the catalogue stays in CAD and the account currency is not changed.
• Client defaults run in the background after the client is created, so a client tenant is never held open behind a few hundred configuration rows. Profiles stored before the country field existed apply the Canadian calendar.
• “Set up your business in one go” completes only when the interview has been applied, even if you built the same rows by hand.
• Some steps are personal. MFA and notification-preference steps reflect the signed-in person; a different admin may see a different status.
• Some MSP detectors look across managed clients. Contracts, assets, software, networks, purchasing, monitoring, change requests and projects count in the MSP’s own organization or any client it manages.
• Dismissal hides the sidebar entry, not the page. After dismissing, the hub stays reachable from Settings → Getting started in both portals, and by its URL (/msp/getting-started, /org/getting-started).
• Tours. Three exist, all for organization pages; the MSP hub never shows Show me. Progress is not remembered; a tour does not advance on its own when you click the highlighted control.
• Nudges are opt-in and bounded. Off unless the scheduler is configured for them; one recipient per workspace; 500 subjects per scope per run.
• Not available on mobile.

Troubleshooting