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: the checklist
Onboarding drops you on the Dashboard, whose tiles show empty states with quick-create actions — see Dashboard tour. From there, Ceum keeps a guided checklist of first actions at Getting started, reached from the list icon in the top bar. Most of its steps tick themselves off from your own data as you work, and which steps you get depends on the starter template you picked. See Getting started checklist.
On the Freelancer template, the list opens with these six:
- Create your first client by opening the new client form. A name and contact info is enough.
- Start a project under that client. Set start and end dates if you know them.
- Add a task and link it to the project.
- Track some time from the Time tracker. Pick the task, and stop when you're done.
- Tag something — create a tag and apply it to a record.
- Set up your brand — company name, address, logo, tax ID, and bank details. See Brand invoicing.
Recording a transaction, adding a subscription, putting an event on the calendar and sharing a link come next. Issue an invoice sits further down again: the checklist keeps it locked until you have both a client and a brand, because an invoice carries the sender's company and bank details.
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 covering the same onboarding, a home screen, and most of the web's 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
- Core entities — Clients, Projects, Tasks, Invoices, Documents.
- Finance — Transactions, Subscriptions, Invoicing workflow, Currency formatting.
- Productivity — Time tracker, Pomodoro sessions, Calendar, Alerts, Search, Email.
- Workspace — Bulk edit, Import from CSV, Export data, Tags, Quick list.
- Concepts — Entities and relationships, Audit and changelog, Import / export formats.