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Getting started

Eight things to set up, roughly in this order. Most of it is done once, and each step makes the ones after it work properly.

Where to find it: Settings (the gear in the top bar) is where most of this lives; the mode switcher beside it is how you move around afterwards.

Before you start

Almost everything in OS3 hangs off one spine: your organization holds clients, a client signs contracts, a contract contains projects, a project holds tasks, and time is logged against those tasks. Every list, board, report and invoice is a different view of that same spine, which is why a figure never has to be reconciled between two tools — there is only one copy of it.

So the order below is not arbitrary. Connections and structure come first because the rest of the product has nothing to attach to without them, and the things that quietly decide whether automation works at all — email domains, billing rates, calendars — come before the automation itself.

Set-up checklist

  1. 01Set up your connected accountsSettings → Connected accountsConnect the accounts OS3 should work through: your Google account, Slack, Atlassian, GitHub. Google asks separately for “send invoices from my address” and “bring mail and chat into Comms” — the second is the bigger consent and is offered as an upgrade on the row rather than demanded up front. Connections are per person, not per workspace, because a bot can never see a human-to-human DM; everyone who wants their own inbox mirrored connects their own.
  2. 02Add your clients and projectsThe mode switcher → Project Management, or Settings → ClientsA client, then a contract under it, then projects under that. This is admin-only and almost everything else needs it to exist first — you cannot log time without a project, and a task needs one too. Work that arrives through another agency gets a partner above the client instead; a client you own outright is unaffected.
  3. 03Use the MCP connection — you can do all of this from ClaudeSettings → User → MCPOS3 exposes itself to Claude over MCP, so creating clients, projects and tasks, writing knowledge pages, logging time and reading reports can all be done by asking rather than clicking. It is the same API with the same permissions, acting as you — an agent can never reach something you could not. It is genuinely the fastest way to do the bulk set-up below, and the fastest way to work day to day afterwards.
  4. 04Decide which agents your organization runsSettings → Agents (admin), then Settings → My Agents (everyone)Agents need TWO consents and they are ANDed: an admin makes an agent available to the organization, then each person switches it on for their own work. Both default to off, so nothing happens to anybody who has not opted in. Give each agent its own Anthropic API key rather than sharing one — spend can only be attributed per key, so a shared key puts everything under Unattributed and you lose the per-agent breakdown in Settings → Cost.
  5. 05Add a profile photoSettings → UserIt shows on tickets, comments, meeting attendance and the account menu. Small, but it is what makes a board of assigned work readable at a glance rather than a column of initials — and the same is true of your agents, whose photos are uploaded in Settings → Agents.
  6. 06Connect and sync your calendarsSettings → Connected accounts, then the calendar sync controls thereConnecting a calendar is what lets the notetaker join meetings you accepted and what lets the twice-daily sweep find meetings nothing recorded. If you keep more than one calendar — your own and a client-provided one — calendar sync mirrors events between them as blocking holds, and you choose per direction whether the copy shows the real title or just “Busy”. A copy never carries a guest list, so nobody is ever emailed about one.
  7. 07Set up billing rates for employees and contractorsSettings → Billing RatesOne list of people with their exceptions hanging off them. Rates are dated, so “from the first of March” is expressible and a raise does not reprice last month. Until somebody has a rate their hours read as unrated in reports and their invoices bill $0 — visibly, but only if somebody looks. A monthly retainer is set here too, as an alternative to an hourly rate at that scope.
  8. 08Set up your organizationSettings → OrganizationThree things in one place. The logo appears top-left and on client-facing documents. The billing inbox is where generated invoices are emailed — until it is set, Send refuses with an explanation rather than silently doing nothing. And your internal email domains are how OS3 tells your own people from a client’s: with none set, every meeting looks external, and meeting notes stay switched off until at least one domain is listed.

Common questions

What are the roles, and what does each one see?
Admins see everything and own the structure — clients, contracts, projects, rates, users, integrations. Full-time employees and contractors see only the clients and projects they are a team member of. External client users are outsiders with a login that reaches exactly one client. Agents (Riley, Charlie) are provisioned accounts rather than people.
Who can create things?
Partners, clients, contracts and projects are admin-only — they are the structure of the business. Tasks and knowledge pages can be created by anybody on the team, inside what they can see. The restriction on contractors is about time, not about tasks or documents: they log their own hours and nobody else's.
A colleague says a project is missing. Where do I look?
Check they are on that project's team (the project page → Team). For employees and contractors the visible client list is derived from the projects they are assigned to, so adding them to the project is what grants the client, not the other way round.
Do I have to do these in order?
Not strictly, but the order matters more than it looks. Clients and projects have to exist before time, tasks or invoices mean anything; email domains have to be set before meetings can be attributed; and rates have to be set before an invoice bills anything but $0.
Nothing is ever hard-deleted, right?
Right. Deleting a client, project, task, page or time entry hides it and everything under it. Settings → Trash is where it comes back from, and you restore from the top down — a project cannot come back while its client is still deleted.
Is there a mobile app?
There is a companion app for talking to Riley — asking what is on today, logging time, creating tickets, catching up after a call. The full product is the web app.