Your first-week onboarding checklist — sign-up to first weekly P&L.

New owners arrive at nouz in one of two states: ready to set everything up in one heroic Sunday, or terrified to start. The Sunday-hero ends with twenty half-configured products and a fixed-cost slice that's 40% wrong. The terrified owner doesn't start. The week-shaped plan below avoids both.

Total setup time is roughly 90 minutes. Spread across seven days, none of it lands as a "session." It lands as eight or nine short blocks, each one fitting between things you were already going to do.

Why spread it across a week

Two reasons. First, you need three real days of close-outs by Sunday to have anything weekly P&L can report on. You can't fake those days. Second, the configuration decisions you make on day one (products, COGS, fixed costs) get sharper after you've seen them collide with one real day. Pre-thinking everything in isolation is what produces the 40%-wrong fixed-cost slice.

Day 1 — the shop and the fixed costs (30 min)

Sign up. Create your shop (single location to start, even if you have two — add the second one in week 2). Enter your fixed costs in the order you actually receive the bills.

1. 01
   Sign up and name the shop.

   Use the trading name, not the legal entity. Two-minute job.

2. 02
   Enter rent.

   Monthly amount, the day-of-month it's paid, the start date of your lease. nouz will pro-rate it daily from here.

3. 03
   Enter salaries and contractor retainers.

   One entry per person. Monthly gross. Don't worry about social charges in week 1 — add them in week 2 as a separate line.

4. 04
   Enter the rest.

   Insurance, software subscriptions, the loan repayment, the linen service. How the daily slice is calculated.

5. 05
   Stop.

   Don't add products today. Don't set up the POS sync today. You're done.

Day 2 — products and COGS (30 min)

Today's job is the product list. Don't aim for completeness on day 2 — aim for your top 80% of revenue. For a café, that's usually 12–15 products. For a retailer, 40–60 SKUs. For a salon, your full service menu plus the retail products you actually move.

1. List your top sellers by guess. Memory is fine; perfection is the enemy.
2. For each one, enter the sale price (what the customer pays) and the COGS (what it costs you to make/buy that single unit).
3. For prep items (a cappuccino, a sandwich), break the COGS down by ingredient — nouz can do this for you. Walkthrough here.
4. Tag any product as either "product sale" or "service" — affects how it shows up on the P&L.
5. Stop. Leave the long-tail SKUs for week 2.

Days 3–5 — three real close-outs (5 min/day)

This is the part you can't fake or front-load. Three real trading days, three real close-outs. Pick whichever days fall next in your calendar.

For each day: run the 60-second daily routine. Enter today's revenue (cash and card, separately). Drop in today's invoices and petty cash. Look at the EBIT number. Lock up.

Day 7 — the first weekly P&L (15 min)

Sunday evening. Three real trading days, fixed costs pro-rating, products entered. Open the statistics screen and look at the weekly view. This is the moment most owners go "oh."

Read it in this order:

1. Weekly gross revenue. Does it match your gut? If it's off by more than 5%, you've mis-tagged a revenue type.
2. Weekly net revenue. Gross minus tax minus fees. If the gap is huge, recheck your VAT rate and your card processor fee.
3. Weekly EBIT. The number that actually matters. If it's negative on a normal trading week, something fundamental is off — usually a product priced below COGS, or a missing revenue source.
4. The three daily EBITs side-by-side. Does the shape make sense? Quietest day vs busiest day — is the gap what you'd expect?

On Sunday of week one I saw that my €4.20 ham-and-cheese was losing me 14 cents per sale because I'd under-counted the ham. Caught and re-priced by Monday lunch. That single fix paid for the entire annual subscription.

What not to do in week one

The three things that derail most new owners. Skip them all.

• Don't backfill the past. The temptation is to enter last month's data to "have a baseline." Don't. The product setup is too fresh; you'll lock in errors. Backfill later, in week 4, when the system is dialled in.
• Don't add a second location. One location, one full week, then expand. Otherwise you're debugging two configurations in parallel.
• Don't set up bank feeds or tax-export integrations. Those are week 3 work, after the daily flow is stable. Adding them in week 1 is how you get tangled in plumbing instead of learning the shape of your numbers.

If you're still on a spreadsheet and trying to decide whether to switch, our template post covers the manual version. If you're ready to set up, create an account and start with day 1 today.

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