Getting started

A first-day overview of Ceum — what it is, how to sign in, where to go next, and which settings are worth setting up first.

This is your first-day overview. It walks through signing in, what onboarding does, the first items to create, and the early settings that pay back the most over time.

What Ceum is

Ceum is a personal workspace for freelancers and solo operators. It tracks clients, projects, tasks, documents, invoices, transactions, subscriptions, and time. Your data is yours alone (see Workspaces and users), and external tools can read and write it on your behalf through MCP tokens.

Sign in

Sign in at Log in. If you're new, create an account at Sign up. You may be asked to verify your email or enter a second factor along the way. See Signing in for the full walkthrough.

Onboarding

The first time you sign in, Ceum takes you to Onboarding. It's a short flow: a welcome screen, a Settings step for your locale preferences, and a Template step where you pick a starter template. It configures your workspace rather than creating items for you. You can skip any step or the whole thing.

See Onboarding guide for the step-by-step reference.

After onboarding: a suggested path

A typical first day looks like:

  1. Start on the Dashboard — your default landing page. The tiles show empty states with quick-create actions. See Dashboard tour.
  2. Create your first client by opening the new client form. A name and contact info is enough.
  3. Create a project under that client. Set start and end dates if you know them.
  4. Add a few tasks and link them to the project.
  5. Start a timer from the Time tracker. Pick the task, and stop when you're done.
  6. Issue an invoice from the Invoices page once you have something billable. Your first invoice is a good prompt to fill in Brand invoicing so the PDF looks right.

Early settings worth setting up

A handful of settings pay back the most if you set them up at the start:

  • General settings — currency, decimals, separators, symbol position, date format, timezone, and the letter prefixes on item IDs.
  • Brand invoicing — company name, address, logo, tax ID, and bank details. Needed for sensible invoice PDFs.
  • Custom statuses — the defaults are sensible, but consider whether you want extra ones (like "Awaiting payment" or "On hold").
  • Tags — define a small starter vocabulary (like vat, meals, q3-eu) before you have lots of transactions to tag.
  • Integrations and MCP — set this up if you plan to drive Ceum from an external tool.

On mobile

There's a Ceum mobile app with broad parity to the web — the same onboarding, a home screen, and most features. For how to get around it, see Mobile navigation; the differences that matter live in each feature's own "On mobile" section.

Where to go next

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