Your first week with Suprata Suite

Suprata is broad — it can run a marina, a service company, a campground, or any combination of the above. That breadth means there's a lot of settings, and the order you tackle them matters more than most people realize. This guide walks through the setup path that minimizes rework.

You don't have to do this in one sitting. Plan on spending an hour or two a day for about a week, working through these in order. Each step builds on the previous ones — doing them out of order means going back to fix things.

Day 1 — Identity and people

Get the basics in place so anything you create from here on out is correctly attributed.

1. Company settings

Settings → Company Settings

Set your company name, phone, address, timezone, and main email address. The timezone matters more than people expect — it affects every date on every report, every appointment slot, and every email timestamp. Get it right now; changing it later means historical data still reads in the old zone.

2. Business units (only if you need them)

Settings → Business Units

A "business unit" is for companies that operate multiple sub-brands or divisions under one Suprata account — e.g., "ACME Plumbing" and "ACME HVAC" sharing one office. If you only have one business, skip this step entirely. Setting up business units when you don't need them creates extra clicks on every invoice for the rest of time.

3. Staff users

User Management → Manage Users

Add each person who will sign in. Don't share accounts — every action is audited per-user, and shared accounts make audit trails meaningless. Pay attention to roles:

Admin — sees everything, can change settings.
Dispatch — can assign techs and reschedule jobs but can't change pricing.
Tech — sees only their own jobs by default.

If you have a pre-existing role pattern in mind, you can build custom roles in Settings → Roles. But don't until you've used the defaults for a few days — you might find they cover your needs.

4. Teams (optional)

User Management → Teams

Teams group users for assignment purposes. e.g., "Day Crew" and "Night Crew", or "Service Side" and "Sales Side". Skip this if you have fewer than ~6 staff.

Day 2 — Catalog

Now define what you sell, before any customer ever lands in the system.

5. Tax tables and tax categories

Settings → Tax Tables and Settings → Tax Categories

This is the most-skipped, most-painful-to-fix-later step. Spend half an hour on it now and you'll save dozens of "why is this tax wrong?" debugging sessions later.

If you charge tax in only one jurisdiction at one rate on everything, the default setup works — verify it and move on. If you charge differently on labor vs. parts, or you have any tax-exempt customers, set up real categories. There's a separate full article on this: How tax categories work in invoicing.

6. Products and the price list

Inventory → Price List

Add every item you sell, with:

A clear name (this is what customers see on invoices).
A unit price.
A tax category (from step 5).
A cost (for margin reporting).
A quantity-on-hand if you track inventory.

If you have a long catalog, use Inventory → Import Price List — there's a CSV template. Don't try to type 800 line items manually.

7. Vendors and warehouses (only if you track inventory)

Inventory → Vendors and Inventory → Warehouses

Skip if you don't physically stock parts. Set up if you do — they unlock cost tracking and stock-level alerts.

Day 3 — Operations

Define the verbs of your business: jobs, appointments, statuses.

8. Job types

Settings → Job Types

Each "type" of work you do gets a row here: e.g., "Service Call", "New Install", "Estimate Visit". Job types control which forms get attached to jobs (e.g., an HVAC eval form vs. a plumbing eval form), so even if you only have one type today, naming it correctly matters.

9. Statuses (review the defaults)

Settings → Job Statuses

The seeded statuses (New, Scheduled, In Progress, Complete, Cancelled) cover most businesses. Look at the list, decide if you need anything custom (Awaiting Parts, Quoted — Pending Approval, etc.), and add only what you'll actually use. Twelve statuses you can't remember the difference between is worse than four good ones.

10. Service agreement templates (only if you sell maintenance contracts)

Service Agreements → Templates

Skip if you only do one-off work. Set up if customers buy ongoing service.

Day 4 — Communications

Get the system talking to customers in your voice.

11. Email settings

Settings → Email Configuration

Connect your SMTP (for outbound) and IMAP (for inbound). Send a test email. Then customize the email templates — the defaults are functional but generic. At minimum personalize:

Invoice send template.
Appointment confirmation template.
Estimate / quote template.

12. SMS settings (if using Twilio)

Settings → SMS / Phone

Connect your Twilio account. Test by sending yourself a message. SMS templates live in the same area as email templates.

13. Brand the customer-facing surfaces

Settings → Customer Portal

Upload your logo. Set your brand colors. The colors flow through to invoice PDFs and customer-facing emails — getting this right makes the whole system feel like yours.

Day 5 — Integrations (the optional but powerful ones)

14. QuickBooks Online (if you use it)

Integrations → QuickBooks

Connect it. Run the setup wizard. Then walk through one full invoice cycle (create invoice in Suprata → wait for sync → confirm in QB) before letting real data flow. There's a separate article on QB sync prerequisites — read it first if you have a complex chart of accounts.

15. Payment processor

Settings → Payment Settings

Connect Stripe or USIO. Take a $1 test charge, then refund it. Don't enable autopay or saved-card rules until you've done at least one manual charge end-to-end — it's much harder to debug an automated charge that fails than a manual one.

16. Reservations / Asset Scheduling (if applicable)

Reservations → Setup Wizard

Only if you operate a marina, campground, RV park, or rent assets to customers. The wizard walks you through asset types, packages, maps, and meters — that's a multi-hour exercise on its own.

Day 6 — Reality test

Don't go live yet. Spend a day pretending to be a customer:

Create a fake account with your own personal email.
Submit a request for service through whatever public form you'll use.
Schedule an appointment.
Run a job from "scheduled" through "complete".
Generate an invoice. Send it to yourself. Pay it. Refund it.
Look at every email and SMS you sent yourself. Did they look right? Did the links work?

Whatever bothers you in this dry run will bother your real customers more. Fix it now.

Day 7 — Train your team and go live

Walk each staff member through the parts they'll use. They don't need a comprehensive tour — they need 20 minutes on the 80% of things they'll actually do daily. Then turn on real customer flow.

What you can defer to later

These are powerful but not first-week material:

Automation workflows — wait until you've done things manually for a few weeks. You'll automate the right things, not the wrong things.
AI search and AI assist — set up after you have data in the system; they're useless on an empty database.
Custom dashboards — the default dashboards are fine for week one. Customize once you know what you actually look at every day.
Custom fields (via the form builder) — wait until you have a clear, repeated need.
Reports — read the seeded reports for a couple of weeks before building custom ones.

Common stumbling blocks

Skipping tax category setup. Fixing this on a year of historical invoices is brutal. Don't skip it.
Sharing user accounts. Audit trails depend on knowing who did what. Make every staff member their own login.
Trying to import historical data on day one. Get the system working with fresh data first; bring history in once you trust the live flow.
Configuring everything before testing anything. Configure → test → configure the next thing. Going wide before going deep is how you discover at week three that nothing actually works end-to-end.

How tax categories work in invoicing
Setting up your first job type
Connecting QuickBooks Online (and what to check first)
Importing customers from a previous system