Part 2 — Set Up Your Company · Chapter 5

Company Profile & Global Settings

Everything company-wide lives on one screen: Setup, reached from the Actions menu in the header. This chapter tours it and says what to fill in on day one against what to leave until the chapter that teaches it. Setup is admin-only. If you can’t see it, you’re not the person this chapter is for.

The Main group

Details is your company profile: name, address, phone, logo. It feeds your document templates and portal branding, so get it right before you generate your first invoice.

Contacts is the master list of your internal people. Everyone who logs in exists here. Creating them properly is chapter 6. The panel also imports and exports contacts in bulk through the Import / Export Center.

Holiday Schedule defines company-wide days off. The resource calendar respects it, which keeps anyone from cheerfully dispatching a crew on Thanksgiving. Individual technicians get their own out-of-office dates on their own records, covered in chapter 6. This panel is for the days nobody works.

Import / Export Center at the company level moves master data in bulk: customers, sites, technicians, contacts, materials. If you’re migrating from another system, this is your on-ramp. The full reference for every import type is in Part 4.

Invoicing holds company-wide billing settings, including invoice numbering and the defaults individual projects inherit. Skim it now, come back with chapter 19.

The Global Items group

Almost every configurable thing in BigWave exists at two levels: global, defined once here and available everywhere, and per-project, defined inside one project and applying only there. The Global Items panels are the define-once side.

  • Global Custom Fields. Fields that appear on every project’s work orders, or on customers, sites, technicians, partners. Chapter 10.
  • Global Tags. Labels usable on work orders across all projects. Chapter 10.
  • Status Defaults. The starter status set new projects begin from. Chapter 7, and worth designing before you create real projects.
  • Global Document Templates, Global Document Folders, Global Documents. Company-wide templates such as your invoice layout and your standard service report, plus folder structures and reference files. Chapter 12.
  • Global Deliverables. Required-document definitions, a signed report or a photo set, that can attach to work everywhere. Chapter 12.
  • Materials Database. Your parts catalog with costs and prices. Chapter 11.
  • Comment Prefills. Canned comment texts users insert instead of typing the same sentence forty times a week.
  • Technician Rating Categories. The dimensions you score techs on, quality and punctuality and the like, if you use ratings. Chapter 6.
  • Global Report Windows. Named recurring time windows, weekly or monthly, used by reporting. Chapter 23.
  • Roles. The permission sets from chapter 4.
  • Workflow Types. Global workflow definitions. Chapter 7.

Don’t work down this list top to bottom. Know where things live. Each referenced chapter tells you when to come back.

Integrations

When enabled for your company, an Integrations group appears with setup panels for QuickBooks (invoice line export, chapter 19), GeoTab (vehicle tracking devices) and legacy Work Market connections.

The Audit Trail

The Other group holds the company-level Audit Trail: who changed what, when, across setup data. Every major record type in BigWave carries its own audit panel too, customers and sites and work orders and projects and technicians and partners. When something looks wrong, the audit trail answers “who touched this” in seconds, which is why the manual keeps pointing at it.

Day-one checklist

  1. Fill in Details completely, logo included.
  2. Create your people in Contacts with the right access levels and roles. Chapter 6 has the details.
  3. Enter this year’s Holiday Schedule.
  4. Design your Status Defaults before creating projects. Chapter 7 makes this painless.
  5. Skip everything else until its chapter sends you back here.

Commercial (Harbor Grill): nothing customer-specific happens at this level. That’s the point. Setup is for things true of Beacon Electric regardless of who the customer is.

Residential (the Okafors): same. If you find yourself wanting a per-customer setting on this screen, the setting you want is on a project. Chapter 9.