Setting up your company in the Console begins with building a digital reflection of the business you already run. You can describe your sites, the areas and workstations within them, the people who work there, and the resources they use. You can then add inventory, business relationships and financial records.

You do not need to enter everything in one sitting. Start with the structure of your operation, then bring in the information your teams need for their first work in the Console.

Map your working environment

Begin by adding your business locations as sites. Within each site, create areas to represent spaces with a particular responsibility. Within an area, create bays for individual workstations. Each bay is responsible for a specific work function.

Level	What it represents	Example
Site	An individual business location	Birmingham facility
Area	A part of a site with a particular responsibility	Machining area
Bay	A workstation within an area with a specific work function	Milling bay 01

This creates a hierarchy: site → area → bay. It helps your team describe where work happens, where resources belong and where someone should go to carry out a task.

You can also record what an area or bay is capable of and the capacity available there. This gives your teams more useful information when planning and assigning work.

Add machines to workstations

Machines are recorded separately from the site hierarchy, then assigned to bays. A machine must belong to a bay, and each bay can have no more than one machine. A bay can still exist without a machine, so you can represent inspection, assembly or other workstations that do not rely on one.

When adding a machine, record what it can do, its capacity, its associated running costs and any scheduled maintenance. These details help your team understand which work a machine can support and account for its availability and cost when planning production.

Add your people

Next, add your staff and assign them to the relevant sites, teams and departments. Include their work details and, where appropriate, their running costs or hourly rates.

This connects the people doing the work to the places and teams they belong to. It also gives managers a clearer basis for distributing work, reviewing capacity and understanding the cost of an activity.

Organise your inventory

Add the materials, components and other inventory your business uses. The Console supports inventory in multiple currencies, so you can record items purchased or valued in different currencies.

Give each item its SKU and location. SKUs can be used to create scannable barcodes that match identifiers already used in your business. Location information helps people find an item within a site, whether you operate one straightforward storeroom or several complex facilities.

Taking care with locations and identifiers at this stage makes inventory easier to find and use later in production, purchasing and planning.

Add customers and business relationships

Add your customers and their contact details, followed by your suppliers and other business relationships. Record the people your team speaks to, how to contact them and the company each person represents.

These records make business information available where it is needed: when creating documents, managing work, communicating with a customer or supplier, and reviewing activity across the company.

Bring in information from an existing system

If you are moving from another ERP or business system, you may be able to export your existing records as CSV files. CSV stands for comma-separated values: it is a common file format for rows of information, such as customers, inventory or staff.

You can import these files through the Console’s Data Studio. During import, you map the columns in your CSV to the corresponding fields in the Console. For example, a column called “Customer Name” in your export can be matched to the Console’s customer name field. Review the mapping before completing the import so each piece of information goes to the right place.

Bringing existing data into the Console makes it available for the work that follows, from document creation and communication to planning and analysis. It also establishes which people, places and resources can be selected and connected as your team uses the platform.

Add bank records for financial analysis

You can begin building your financial picture by downloading bank records from your online banking service and importing them into the Console. OFX, or Open Financial Exchange, is a format used to exchange structured financial information, including bank statement transactions.

Where your bank offers an OFX download, it can provide more structured transaction information than a basic CSV export. The exact detail depends on what your bank includes in the file. CSV bank records can also be imported, so you can use the format available to you.

After import, review the accounts and transactions, then categorise the activity you want to analyse. This gives the Console a starting point for financial reporting, budgeting and comparisons between expected and actual activity.

Check your setup and start working

Once your sites, people, machines, inventory, business relationships and financial records are in place, review a few examples from each area. Check that workstations sit within the right areas, machines are attached to the correct bays, staff belong to the right teams, and imported records have been mapped correctly.

Your setup forms the foundation for what your teams can select, find and work with across the Console. It does not have to be complete before anyone can begin, but the more accurately it reflects your business, the more useful it becomes as work moves through the platform.