First-Run Setup — Administrator Guide

Two screens stand between a new tenant and a working Arcvue: the Setup Wizard, which connects your systems and maps your accounts, and the Questionnaire, which tells the forecast how your business actually behaves. Neither is a form to rush.

Where they are: the Setup Wizard at Onboarding; the Questionnaire at Setup → Questionnaire.

A link to one particular step does not work — and nothing tells you so. If you are on step 3 and copy the address out of your browser to send to somebody, they will land on step 1. No error, no warning, on either end. Send them to Onboarding and say which step to click in the sidebar.

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Part 1 — The Setup Wizard

It is a checklist, not a queue

The wizard has a step sidebar on the left and you can click any step at any time. It opens on the first step you have not completed, which is a convenience, not a constraint — if you are waiting on somebody else for ERP credentials, go and do the users step and come back.

The header carries a progress bar, a percentage, and "N of M steps complete". The step list itself comes from the server, so what you see is your tenant's checklist rather than a fixed script.

Required and optional are different, and only one of them blocks you

An optional step shows an Optional badge and a Skip for Now button. Skipping records the date and moves you on — "you can complete it later in Admin", which is where those settings live permanently.

A required step has no Skip button at all. That is not an oversight; it is how the wizard tells you the difference. Completed steps carry a green tick and the date; skipped ones carry an amber marker and the date.

When a step is refused, the message is the server's own reason — what happened and what to do next — not a status code. Read it before retrying; a refusal that names a missing registry or a busy one is telling you to wait or to fix a setting, not to press Save again.

The steps

Step	What it does
Company info	Fiscal year, organization type, and the basics that frame everything else. The organization type decides which screens you see; see below.
Divisions	The parts of your business Arcvue reports on separately. A business that runs as one unit needs just one, and the step starts with it filled in; see Divisions below.
ERP connection	Which accounting system you run. No credentials are entered here — that is the next step.
ERP credentials	The sign-in for that system, on its own screen.
Initial data sync	The first pull from your ERP. Later steps read what this brings in.
Capability matrix	The Onboarding Conformance Engine's read of your setup. It runs after each ERP sync, so if it looks empty, complete the sync step and come back.
Chart of accounts	GL mapping. See below — this is the one that matters. A business keeping its books in Arcvue starts here from a starter chart; see Starting from a chart of accounts.
Indirect rates	Your pools and the bases they are allocated over. Government contractors only: a commercial business does not get this step.
Contracts	Review of the contracts the sync brought in.
Forecast year setup	Which year you are forecasting and over how many years.
Users	The people who will use Arcvue, and their roles.
Treasury config	Cash and banking setup, and your payroll schedule. See The treasury step below.
Email	Where Arcvue sends what it sends.
Review / Go Live	The checklist and the launch button.

The organization type decides which screens you see

The Organization Type on the company step is not a label. A government contractor sees every screen. A commercial business does not see the screens built only for government contracting, such as indirect and provisional rates, the incurred-cost submission, cost pools and government property, and its wizard has no Indirect rates step. Its books read in commercial terms too: the P&L titles its indirect sections Fringe Benefits, Overhead and Operating Expenses rather than as rate pools. Nothing is deleted when the type changes: change it later in Admin → Configuration and those screens come back with everything they held. A company that never chooses reads as a government contractor.

What the connection step will ask you for

The picker is Arcvue's catalog of the accounting systems it reads from, and it opens on the one your tenant already has. Arcvue Accounting comes first: choose it if you keep your books in Arcvue, and the credentials step has nothing to ask. It says "Nothing to connect for Arcvue Accounting" and you move on. A manual CSV upload works the same way. Arcvue's demo dataset is not offered here.

For any other system, what the credentials step asks for depends on which one you choose, and the shapes differ:

• some connect by database credentials: host, port, database, username and password;
• some by API endpoint: a URL, an API key, and a username and password;
• one connects by sign-in approval rather than a stored password: you authorize Arcvue from inside your own accounting system and type nothing.

Check which shape yours uses before you sit down to do this, because the third kind needs no credentials at all and the first two need details you may have to ask someone for.

Selecting nothing and continuing is refused: the step tells you to pick one rather than saving an empty choice.

The sign-in-approval system is the easier one. Instead of typing a credential you are sent to that system's own secure sign-in and returned here. Once connected, the same screen offers Disconnect, which breaks the link. Disconnecting does not delete anything Arcvue has already pulled in; it stops future syncs.

Divisions

A division is a part of your business that Arcvue reports on separately: revenue, margin and pipeline each break down by it. If your business runs as one unit, one division is the right answer. The step opens with a single row named after your company, and Save & Continue is all it needs.

Each row has a name and an optional code. The code is how your ERP or an import refers to the division; leave it blank and Arcvue makes one from the name. Add division adds a row, and a row you have not saved yet can be removed.

A saved division keeps its name and code. Pipeline rules, people and imports refer to a division by its name, and opportunity routing by its code, so the step shows a saved division as it is. To rename one, add the new name and make the old one inactive. A saved division is never deleted either: contracts may already point at it, so a division you stop using is made inactive instead: clear Active and save. It stays listed, so turning it back on later keeps its history attached. The step will not save two divisions with one name, or a set with none active, and it says which rule a row breaks before you press the button.

The setup checklist's Divisions & Entities Configured item and the System Health divisions check read the same divisions, so both clear the moment you save.

The treasury step

This is where the cash forecast learns when you pay people. Payroll Cadence offers the two schedules the forecast models:

• Semi-Monthly: two fixed pay days a month, entered as Pay Anchor Day 1 and Pay Anchor Day 2, each from 1 to 31. A day past the end of a short month means that month's last day.
• Bi-Weekly: no days to enter. Paydays follow your most recent payroll run once payroll data arrives.

ACH Lag (days), Starting Cash Balance, Min Cash Threshold and Revolver / LOC Limit complete the step. The first save creates your treasury settings and later saves update them. A pay day outside 1 to 31 is refused rather than saved.

The tables you will be reading

Five steps put a table in front of you. The columns are worth knowing before you get there, because several of them are decisions rather than readouts.

Capability matrix — what the conformance engine found after the sync.

Column	What it is
Module	The area of the platform being assessed.
Status	What the engine concluded.
History	How much historical data arrived for that module. Thin history is not an error; it changes what the forecast can do.
Required	Whether that module needs to be satisfied before go-live.

Chart of accounts — one row per GL account.

Column	What it is
Code	Your account number, as it exists in your ERP. Arcvue does not invent or renumber these.
Name	Your account name.
Role	The decision. Which Arcvue semantic category the account maps to — this is the field the whole step exists for.
Active	Whether the mapping is in force. Deactivating a row retires the mapping without deleting the account.

Indirect rates — one row per pool account.

Column	What it is
Account Code	The account carrying the pool cost.
Description	What it is, in your own words.
Allocation Base	The decision. What the pool is spread over — Labor, Revenue, or Total Cost. Get this wrong and every rate built on the pool is wrong.
Order	The sequence pools are applied in, which matters wherever one pool's base includes another pool's cost.

Contracts — what the ERP sync brought in.

Column	What it is
Contract #	The contract number as your ERP holds it.
Name	The contract name.
Division	The organizational unit it belongs to.
Start / End	Period of performance.
Ceiling	The contract's funded ceiling.

Read this table rather than skim it. It is the first chance to notice that a contract came across with the wrong division or a missing end date, and both are much cheaper to fix here than after the forecast has been built on them.

Users — the people you are adding. Add User opens a New User card in place: Username, Display Name, Email, Role and Password. Create adds them; Cancel closes the card without adding anyone. Adding a user here is the same action as adding one later in Admin — the step exists in the wizard so a new tenant is not left as a single login.

Column	What it is
User	Their username.
Email	Their address — this is where an invitation or a password reset goes, so a wrong one strands the account.
Role	What they can reach.
Actions	Edit and remove, per row.

Email — the Email Recipients field on the email step is who receives Arcvue's scheduled reports. It takes a list, and it is separate from the user list above: being a user does not subscribe you to anything, and a recipient does not have to be a user.

When the first sync finishes it reports what it moved: how many tables were synced, the total row count, and a table listing each table against its Rows.

Read the per-table Rows figures, not just the total. A sync that moved a large total can still have brought back zero rows for one table you depend on, and the total is exactly where that hides.

The one step to slow down on

The Chart of accounts step opens with a panel that says, in the product's own words, "Before you begin — this step matters more than any other."

It is right, and the reason is worth internalizing: GL mapping drives every financial calculation, forecast, indirect rate, and AI insight in Arcvue. A miscategorized account does not affect one chart — it cascades. Arcvue asks you to set aside about 25 minutes and offers help at info@arcvue.ai before, during or after the step.

The step gives you auto-detect and suggestions to work from. Treat both as proposals: they are a starting point that saves typing, not a decision that has been made for you. You are the one who knows what your accounts mean.

Starting from a chart of accounts

A business that keeps its books in Arcvue begins with an empty chart of accounts, so for that tenant the step opens with Start from a chart of accounts: four starter charts, with the one built for your organization type chosen for you.

Starter chart	Built for	What it carries
Government contractor	Government Contracting, Aerospace & Defense	Direct costs by type, the fringe, overhead and G&A pools your indirect rates are built from, and the unallowable costs you keep out of them.
Technology company	Technology	Subscription and services revenue, deferred revenue, cloud and software costs.
Professional services firm	Professional Services	Services and reimbursable revenue, subcontractors and client expenses.
General business	Other	Sales and the operating costs of any small business.

Load chart creates the accounts, opens the current year's twelve monthly periods if the tenant has none, and sets the accounts Arcvue posts cash, receivables, payables and deferred revenue to, unless you have already set your own. It then starts a sync, so the new accounts reach the mapping list on the same step, where auto-detect proposes their mappings.

Three things are deliberate:

• It loads once, into an empty chart. Once any account exists the panel is gone, and a second load is refused. A template merged into a chart you have started would sit beside it as a second set of accounts for the same things.
• It is only for books kept in Arcvue. A tenant on another ERP gets its chart from that system with the first sync, and is never offered one.
• One number means one thing in every chart. 8130 is Software Subscriptions whichever chart you load. A commercial chart has no direct-cost accounts, so no operating cost asks which contract it belongs to.

After it loads, the chart is yours: rename, add or retire accounts on the Chart of Accounts page.

Going live

The Review step shows three counts — Completed (of the total), Skipped (optional), and Remaining — then the full checklist with a date against everything finished or skipped.

Underneath, one of two banners:

• Red: "N required steps still incomplete: …. Complete these before going live." Go Live is disabled while this shows, and the banner names exactly which steps.
• Amber: "N optional steps not yet completed. You can still go live and configure these later in Admin, or skip them now." Go Live works.

Go Live launches the tenant and takes you to the dashboard. Only required steps gate it. An amber banner is a note, not a blocker.

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Part 2 — The Questionnaire

Setup → Questionnaire. Twenty-eight questions in six sections:

Section	What it calibrates
Your Business	How the business is structured.
Cash and Treasury	The cash-flow forecast — how fast you bill, how fast you get paid.
Books and Close Date	Your close date decides which numbers are actuals and which are forecast.
Growth and Pipeline	Pipeline and forecast targets.
Debt and Covenants	Covenant tracking, if you have bank financing.
People, Bonuses, and Reporting	Bonus structure and who sees what.

It only asks what it does not already know

The Questionnaire is data-aware. A question whose answer is already in your data is not asked again — so the length of your Questionnaire depends on how much the ERP sync already told Arcvue. If every section is already populated, you get a "fully configured" screen instead of a form. A short Questionnaire is a sign the sync worked, not a sign something was missed.

It will not overwrite what you have

Certain areas — debt, covenants, bonuses, EBITDA, email, growth, and bank balance — are protected. Where those are already populated, the Questionnaire shows them read-only, as a confirmation rather than as an editable field. It is showing you what it will use; it is not inviting you to re-enter it.

If one of those values is wrong, change it on the screen that owns it, not here.

The close date is the answer with the longest reach

Of the twenty-eight, the close date is the one that changes the most downstream. It is the line between actuals and forecast: everything on or before it is treated as real, everything after it as projected. Getting it wrong does not produce an error — it produces confident numbers of the wrong kind.

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The two ways the questionnaire ends, and why only one lets you go back

"Arcvue is configured for your business" is the ordinary finish: you worked through the questions and Arcvue has your answers. It offers Go to Dashboard and Go back and change something, which returns you to the first question with everything you entered still there.

"Your platform is fully configured" is different, and it is the one that surprises people. It appears when every configuration item is already set — so the questionnaire has nothing to ask and does not run. It says so plainly ("All 28 configuration items are already set. No questionnaire needed") and offers only Go to Dashboard.

That screen is not an error and you have not skipped anything. It is the same principle as It only asks what it does not already know, taken to its limit — there is no Go back and change something because there are no answers to change. Everything it settled is still editable in Admin whenever you want it.

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Part 3 — When something looks wrong

Symptom	What it means → what to do
"No ERP selected. Go back to step 2 to select your ERP system."	The credentials step cannot run before the connection step. Use the sidebar to go back.
The capability matrix is empty	It runs after an ERP sync. Complete Initial data sync first, then return — the step says so itself.
Go Live is grayed out	Read the red banner directly above it: it names the required steps still outstanding. Optional steps never block it.
A step has no "Skip for now" button	It is required. The absence of the button is the signal.
I skipped something I now need	Everything skipped is configurable in Admin afterwards. Skipping is deferral, not refusal.
The Questionnaire barely asked me anything	Its questions are suppressed where the data already exists. Expected after a good sync.
A Questionnaire value is shown but I cannot edit it	It is one of the protected areas. Change it on its own screen; the Questionnaire will not overwrite it.
I sent someone a link to step 3 and they landed on step 1	Working as built — the address does not carry the step. Send them to Onboarding and name the step; they click it in the sidebar.
A GL account is mapped wrongly and things look strange everywhere	Expected, and it is why that step carries its own warning. Correct the mapping — it is not a one-time-only step.

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One-line summary

Work the Setup Wizard in any order you like — only required steps gate Go Live, optional ones can be skipped and finished later in Admin — and slow down on Chart of accounts, because GL mapping cascades into every calculation, forecast and rate in the platform; then answer the Questionnaire, which asks only what your data has not already told it, never overwrites your protected values, and whose close date is the line between actuals and forecast.

Related

• Signing in, and the four ways a password gets changed → Account Access (Platform user guides)
• Users, roles, and permissions after setup → Access and Users
• Tenant settings after go-live → Configuration
• Cost pools and the rate build-up → Cost Pools