Quick start

This guide takes you from nothing to a working CRM: create an account, build your first table, add records, invite your team and take a first look at boards and dashboards. Each section is doable in sequence — a first setup takes well under an hour.

If you only remember one thing: everything you build lives in a workspace, and every workspace belongs to an organization. Registering gives you one of each, ready to use — you never have to set them up yourself.

Registration provisions a personal organization with one workspace inside it. You own both.

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1. Create your account

You can register with an email and password, or with a social identity provider.

With email and password

1. Open the app and choose Create your account (the /register page — there is a link from the sign-in page: “Don’t have an account?”).
2. Enter your full name, email, and a password. A strength meter shows whether the password meets the requirements as you type.
3. Click Create Account. You are signed in immediately and land in your new workspace — no email confirmation is needed to get started (but see the next section).

With a social provider

Below the form you may see buttons such as Sign up with Google or Sign up with GitHub. Clicking one sends you to that provider to approve access, then brings you back signed in. Your email is taken from the provider; when the provider reliably asserts it as verified (Google and Apple do), it counts as verified and you can skip the next section — otherwise the usual verification banner applies.

Note

If your company’s domain enforces single sign-on, the flow changes: as soon as you enter a company email, the form is replaced by an SSO button — self-service registration is blocked for that domain and you sign in through your company’s identity provider instead. See Enterprise SSO.

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2. Verify your email

Fresh email/password accounts start unverified, and a dismissible banner at the top of the app reminds you until that changes.

1. Click Resend email in the banner. A verification link is sent to your address (nothing is sent automatically at sign-up — the banner’s button is how you request it).
2. Open the link from the email. It confirms your address and you’re done. The link is single-use and works even if you’re logged out.

Caution

Verification is not just cosmetic: you cannot accept an organization invitation until your email is verified. If a teammate invites you and the acceptance fails with “Verify your email address”, this is why. Verify first, then accept.

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3. What registration created for you

You didn’t fill in any “organization” or “workspace” forms — Tessule provisioned them for you the moment you registered:

• An organization named after you (for example Ada’s Organization), with you as its owner. Organizations are the management layer: members and invitations, billing, usage limits, backups, SSO. See Organization administration.
• A workspace inside it (for example Ada’s Workspace), with you as a workspace admin. The workspace is where all your actual data lives — tables, records, roles, dashboards. It is set as your default, so signing in takes you straight there.

Two details worth knowing:

• Your first workspace is created deletable — it’s meant as a place to play and test. Once it holds real data, an organization owner or admin can mark it permanent from Organization Settings → Workspaces. Workspaces created later default the other way round.
• If you signed up through enterprise SSO, or your email domain is set to auto-join a company organization, you may land directly in that organization’s workspaces instead of getting a personal one (and may be asked to enrol in multi-factor authentication first, if the organization requires it).

The workspace switcher in the top navigation bar (showing your workspace name and role) is where you switch workspaces later, open Organization settings (the gear beside the organization’s name), and see pending invitations.

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4. Create your first table

Tables are where your data lives — contacts, deals, projects, whatever your model needs. Everything you define yourself: there are no fixed “Contacts”/“Deals” objects. You can build a table by hand, or describe what you want and let the AI schema assistant draft it.

As the workspace admin you’ll see a Build group in the navigation (Data, Table Administration, Audit, Query, Charts). By default only admins see it — the surface is gated on the builder:access action, which a custom role can grant to power users (see Authorization & Permissions).

Manually, in the schema builder

1. Go to Table Administration in the navigation.
2. Click Create Table (or Create Your First Table on the empty state).
3. Fill in the dialog:
   • Display Name — what people see, e.g. Customer Contacts.
   • Table Name (Internal) — a URL-friendly identifier, pre-filled from the display name.
   • Description and AI Hint — optional, but the hint pays off later when AI assistants query your data.
   • Record visibility — leave on Workspace for now (everyone with access sees all records). Private turns on per-record visibility; see Authorization & Permissions.
4. Click through to the table’s schema editor and use Add Field for each column: pick a Field Name, a field type (text, number, date, picklist, currency, reference to another table, and more), and whether it’s required. The full field-type catalogue is covered in Tables and fields.

With the AI schema assistant

1. Go to Data in the navigation. At the top (or front-and-centre if you have no tables yet) sits the schema assistant chat.
2. Describe what you want in plain language — “a CRM for a small consultancy: clients, projects linked to clients, and invoices” — and answer any clarifying questions it asks.
3. The assistant proposes a validated schema plan: tables, fields and relationships, shown as a diagram before anything is created.
4. Click Apply when you’re happy. Applying is atomic and requires the schema:apply action (workspace admins have it), so a member can chat and draft but only an admin can make it real.

Note

If you don’t see the assistant panel, AI features aren’t enabled for your organization — build manually instead, the result is identical. See AI assistants for what else the assistants can do.

If you already have data in spreadsheets, Import CSV (on the Table Administration page) can create the table and load the rows in one go — see Importing data.

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5. Add a few records

1. From Data, open your new table (or use a Home page quick link once you have some).
2. Click Add Item, fill in the fields, and save. Repeat a couple of times so the views below have something to show.
3. Prefer typing into a grid? Open Sheets in the navigation — every table appears as a spreadsheet-style tab along the bottom, editable in place, and live-updating as teammates change data.

Records have more depth than a first pass needs — detail pages, comments, attachments, history, sharing. When you’re ready, see Working with records.

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6. Invite your teammates

Invitations are issued at the organization level and can grant workspace access in the same step.

1. Open the workspace switcher in the top bar and click the gear beside your organization’s name (or go to Organization Settings directly). This needs an org owner or admin — as the founder, that’s you.
2. On the Members tab, open the invite dialog (Invite User to Organization).
3. Enter the teammate’s email and choose their organization role — usually member. Organization roles govern the organization itself, not data access; only an owner can invite another owner or admin.
4. Add one or more workspace grants: pick the workspace and the workspace role the invitee should get there (Admin, Member, or Reader). The grants are applied the moment the invite is accepted — one-step onboarding.
5. Send the invite. You’re shown a shareable link — copy it now and send it to your teammate yourself (Tessule stores only a hash of the link’s token, so it can’t be displayed again; use Re-issue invite link on the pending invite to mint a fresh one, which invalidates the old one).

Accepting an invitation

Your teammate then:

1. Opens the link — or, if they already have a Tessule account with that email, they’ll find the invitation waiting on their Invitations page (a badge appears on the workspace switcher).
2. Registers or signs in if needed, and verifies their email — accepting is refused until the address is verified, so nobody can claim an invite sent to a mailbox they don’t control.
3. Accepts. Organization membership and every workspace grant on the invite are applied immediately; the new workspace appears in their switcher.

Invitations expire, and the invited email must match the account accepting it. Pending invites can be edited (change role or grants) or revoked from the Members tab until they’re accepted.

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7. Assign roles

You already assigned each invitee a baseline workspace role on the invite. To adjust later:

• Workspace Settings → Members — change a member’s baseline role (Admin / Member / Reader) with Edit role.
• Workspace Settings → Roles — create custom roles that grant extra named actions on top of a baseline, and control per-record and per-field visibility.

Roles are additive and default-deny, and there’s an important distinction between organization roles (management) and workspace roles (data). Rather than re-learn it here, read Authorization & Permissions — it’s the one guide every admin should read end-to-end.

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8. A first look at boards and dashboards

Boards

A board is a drag-and-drop pipeline view — records as cards in lanes, one lane per stage. It appears once a table has a stage field: a picklist whose values you’ve designated as a lifecycle (e.g. Lead → Qualified → Won). Set one up in the schema editor, then:

1. Open the table’s record list — a Board button now appears.
2. Drag cards between lanes to move records through the pipeline. Lanes a card isn’t allowed to move to are dimmed; the server enforces the transition rules either way.

See Lifecycles for stage machines and what they unlock (stage history, transition rules).

Dashboards

1. Open Dashboards in the navigation and click Create — or, if the AI dashboard assistant is enabled, describe the dashboard you want and apply its proposal.
2. Dashboards are assemblies of saved charts and query tables. Charts are authored on the Charts page (in the Build group), typically on top of saved queries from the Query page.

The full analytics pipeline — queries → charts → dashboards — is covered in Queries and Dashboards.

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Where to go next

If you want to…	Read
Understand how all the pieces fit together	Platform overview
Model richer data (field types, references, constraints)	Tables and fields
Load existing spreadsheets	Importing data
Lock down who sees what	Authorization & Permissions
Require sign-off on sensitive edits	Approvals
Connect external tools or scripts	API access
Harden your account (MFA, passkeys)	Account security

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Troubleshooting

“Your organization uses single sign-on” replaced the sign-up form. Your email’s domain mandates SSO. Use the SSO button — your account is created automatically on first sign-in through your company’s identity provider.

My teammate can’t accept the invitation. The two usual causes: their email isn’t verified yet (accepting is blocked until it is — they should use the banner in the app to send the verification link), or they’re signed in with a different email than the one the invite was sent to.

I don’t see the Build menu (Data, Table Administration…). Those entries require the builder:access action, which only workspace admins hold by default. Ask an admin to raise your role or grant you a custom role that includes it — and note that hiding the menu is a courtesy; the server enforces every permission regardless.

The AI schema assistant isn’t showing. It’s only available when AI features are enabled for your organization. Build tables manually instead — nothing else depends on the assistant.

I invited someone but they never got an email. Deliver the invite link yourself — creating an invite shows a shareable link exactly once, and the invitee also sees the pending invitation in-app when signed in with the matching address. If the link is lost, use Re-issue invite link.