Setting up & overseeing

As the owner you get the same daily dashboard your managers use, plus a few menus they don't. So go through the Manager guide for the day-to-day — this guide is about the things only you set up and only you can see.

Everything hangs off a campaign — that's one book, like The Being Safe Book, with its own branding, prices and payment account. Here's where you manage them, and where you'd add a new one if you launched another book.

Open a campaign and this is the control panel. You set the branding and the contact details customers see, and — this is owner-only — you paste in the Stripe live key so card payments land in the right bank account. There's a separate box just below it for a Stripe test key: while a test key is sitting there, anyone can practise a card payment with test cards and no real money moves — perfect for training a new starter or checking the pay page. When you're ready to trade for real, you clear that test box, and the go-live check will remind you if you forget. You also decide how long the early-payment saving lasts, and how many weeks before a customer counts as ready to re-sell to. Managers can run a campaign, but only you hold these keys.

Templates work for managers too, but as owner you can add the campaign logo that appears on every email, invoice and letter, and you can send yourself a real test message to see exactly what a customer gets before it goes out. It's the safest way to check a change looks right.

Here's your team, and there are five hats to hand out. Reps only ever see the deal screen. Credit control gets the chase list plus full editing of orders — it's part of the job — but never creating or deleting them, and never user admin. Despatch gets the dispatch room, with the post room as a per-person toggle. Managers run the whole office, and owners see the lot — settings and payment keys included. Only you, as an owner, can promote someone to owner, and when a staff member leaves you switch them off here in one click. And when someone rings up stuck on 'it won't let me do the thing', use View as on their row — it drops you into their account so you see exactly what they see, no password needed. A purple banner reminds you whose screen you're on, everything's recorded against them, and one click puts you back to your own account.

Settings is where you tune the money rules — how many days' grace before we start chasing an invoice, and when something becomes seriously overdue. Credit control's urgency, and what floats to the top of the chase list, all follow the numbers you put here.

Further down Settings are three helpers you can switch on or leave off. Company lookup puts the Companies House register on the rep's screen and costs nothing. Address lookup gives them real Royal Mail addresses — that one is charged per search, a few pence a time, so keep an eye on the balance because when it runs dry the reps get told to speak to the office. And the assistant reads incoming customer email and drafts replies for staff to check; it never sends anything on its own. Each needs a key pasted in, then Test connection, then the switch, then Save — and remember pressing Test on its own doesn't save anything. Once a key is stored the box tells you so rather than showing it back to you.

Each book has its own setup — the standard price, the packages a rep can pick, and the cover layout: exactly where the customer's business name and logo are printed. You can preview it with sample details so every cover comes out right.

If you ever need to know who changed a price or edited an order, the audit log has it — every important action, who did it, and when. It's your peace of mind that nothing changes behind your back.

The wallboard is the big screen for the sales floor — every rep's week at a glance, fresh sales, chased sales, and bonus, and it lights up when a new sale comes in. Pop it on the office TV and let it run.

Agent call times is the manager's honesty mirror, straight from the dialler's own log. Long ringers are unanswered calls someone sat on for over a minute — the looking-busy trick. Short dials are the four-second wonders that pump a call count up. Click View calls on anyone and you're looking at their actual calls — dialled by hand or passed to them, how long it rang, how long they talked. You're not accusing anyone from a hunch; you're showing them their own log.

Last thing, and it's an important one. The system can run in a training mode — there's a red banner across the top when it's on. In training mode your staff can practise everything safely: nothing real is sent, no customer is emailed, no card is charged. When you want a clean slate, Reset training data clears the practice orders and lays down a fresh set. And when you're genuinely ready to trade, you switch training off — only then does the system start doing things for real.