When you first onboard, Ceum seeds your workspace from a starter template — a ready-made set of statuses, task types, relationship types, email templates, and default settings so you're productive without configuring everything by hand. You choose your template on the Template step of Onboarding, just after the Settings step.
The templates
There are three templates today. Every new account starts on Freelancer unless you switch.
- Freelancer (default) — a client pipeline, billable task types, and a full invoice flow. The standard solo-consultant setup.
- Developer — feature / task / bug / subtask types and a code-review → QA → done task flow, for ticket-driven product work.
- Personal — a simplified setup for tracking your finances, daily work, and time as a private individual.
What a template seeds
Choosing a template fills in your initial configuration across the app:
- Statuses for clients, projects, tasks, and invoices — see Custom statuses.
- Task types with their billable / standalone / embeddable flags — see Task types.
- Relationship types for project-to-project and task-to-task links — see Relationship types.
- Email templates for the messages Ceum can send.
- Default settings — currency, decimals, timezone, date format, and tax rate.
The templates differ mainly in their task workflow and types: Freelancer leans on billing (a Billable type and an invoice-oriented status set, plus an overdue-reminder email), while Developer swaps in Feature / Task / Bug types and a Backlog → Todo → In Progress → Code Review → QA → Done task flow, and Personal trims both down for private use. All three seed the same kinds of records — only the contents differ.
Applying a template
On the Template step you preview each template, then commit:
- Confirm applies the selected template.
- Skip applies Freelancer as-is.
Either way, your chosen template is remembered on your account (so later defaults follow it). You don't edit the individual items on the onboarding step itself — everything a template creates becomes ordinary configuration you can rename, reorder, or delete afterwards from Settings.
Switching templates later
The onboarding picker runs once, but you can switch templates any time from Settings → Template (/settings/template) — pick another template, or re-apply the current one.
Selecting a template shows you exactly what applying it would do, before anything changes:
- Added — configurations the template brings that your account doesn't have.
- Removed — seeded configurations the template drops that nothing currently uses.
- In use — configurations the template drops that your records still point at. Each one needs a replacement: choose where to reassign it, and the affected records move there instead of breaking.
Nothing is written until you press Apply template (or Reassign and apply when there are reassignments to make). Cancel discards the selection and leaves your account on its current template. The whole change — the reassignments, the added and removed configurations, and the template switch itself — is applied in one step, so your configuration is never left half-switched.
Tips and edge cases
- Freelancer is the fallback. Brand-new accounts and skipped pickers start on Freelancer.
- Templates seed your account once. The starter template is applied when your account is created. After that, only your own actions change your configuration — a status or task type you delete stays deleted, and a rename, color, or reordering you make is never reverted by Ceum.
- You're never locked in. Everything a template creates is ordinary configuration you can edit, reorder, or delete afterwards from Settings.
On mobile
- The same template step runs in mobile onboarding — pick a template (or skip to Freelancer) and the same statuses and task types are seeded.
- Switch templates from the web app. The mobile onboarding has no conflict resolver, so switching templates after onboarding is done from Settings → Template on the web.