Setting Up Kinabase

Welcome to Kinabase!

By choosing Kinabase for your business, you can look forward to managing your data intuitively and effectively. Not only does Kinabase help you to reflect your business processes, it has an easy to use, responsive interface and is conveniently accessible through your browser. Supported by the software consultancy experts at Cambridge Kinetics, you can rely on an Award-winning, friendly and reliable customer experience.

How to get your business setup

Starting to use a new piece of software can often be daunting. That's why we made the sign up and setup process as easy as possible. Not only do we guide you through each step with our Get Started Dashboard, you can complete them in any order and at a time to suit you. It's as easy as that!

When you sign up to Kinabase and log in for the first time, the screen below will guide you through each step. The result is a system that you can understand, that reflects your own business, and that works for you and your team. We also use an easy to follow traffic light system so that you can instantly see what needs to be done.

Collections

The data that you add to Kinabase is at the heart of the system. Recognising the uniqueness of each business, we allow the data to be structured in a way that suits you.

Take a moment to think about the different sets of data you use everyday. For example, most businesses will have a list of Companies or Contacts and Suppliers. For each Company, you might then have a Project name or Shipments. You call your sets of data whatever you want in Kinabase and helpfully there are no limits to the number of sets that you can create. All the sets of data created will then fit together seamlessly.

In Kinabase we call each type of data that you have pulled together a Collection. When we talk about creating Collections, we are talking about a structure for each of the sets of data. For example, if you have a list of Suppliers as a Collection, this Collection might then be expanded further to contain their name, their address, a website and this might even link to a name that exists on your Contacts collection!

For further information on how to create a Collection, see our Create a Collection article.

Import your data

As the amount of data in Kinabase grows, so too will your appreciation of what Kinabase can do for you. It's perfectly okay to add records manually into your system, but if you're migrating from a different system or have existing spreadsheets of data, then you'll want to import the data in order to save time.

Once your Collection is set up, you can import data into it at any time. To begin, make sure that you have a CSV file prepared.

For a step-by-step guide on importing your data, see our Import Your Data support page.

Invite your colleagues

To unlock the potential Kinabase has across your workplace, you will need to be able to add additional Users. Each User will have their own login which you, as the administrator control. In order to be added as a user, each user have their own personal email address.

There are a few ways you can add users to the system:

• If you are working your way through Getting Started, then click the Add User button in the panel.
• Alternatively, click your personal menu at the lower left the screen, then Settings and select Users from the Organisation group menu.

Adding a User to Kinabase

The process to add the User is quite straightforward and involves entering values into the appropriate fields: The user's first name, last name and their email address, which should all be unique to them.

As part of the process, the person that you have invited will be sent an email. In the meantime, they will be visible on your Manage Users list in the admin area.

Create an Activity

One very useful feature in Kinabase is to record activities to allow your colleagues to see what has happened (and for you to remember what you did!). It's worth noting however, that not every collection needs an activity record. For example, if you are storing a list of obsolete equipment, then you may not need to record any activity.

You can easily enable Activities for each Collection you want by either:

• Viewing the collection, then clicking the options menu and select Configure.
• Clicking on the personal menu at the bottom left, select Settings, then Collections and finally clicking on the Collection that you want to manage.

Enable the Activities option for a Collection

When you are viewing the Collections settings screen, click on the Activities menu and turn this on by clicking on the greyed out switch, which will turn blue.

If you enable Activities for a Collection then each record in Kinabase will have its own associated Activity history, which can be seen as a tab when the record is viewed.

The Activities tab becomes available in the Collection for each record

Click the Add button to make a note of any Activity that you have done for that record. This will appear in addition to automatically generated activities, which come from changes made to the record itself.

Finish your Organisation Profile

The last step in the set up of your business on Kinabase is to make sure that all of your organisation's details have been completed. This helps certain features work better for you by automatically pre-filling the information.

You can access your profile at any time by either:

• Selecting the Continue button on the Finish your organisation's profile panel of the Getting Started screen
• Clicking on the user menu at the bottom left of the screen, selecting Settings and then Organisation Details from the Organisation section of the menu.

Well done on getting your business set up!