Planyard Company Account Setup Guide

Here are the steps and introductory videos that help you set up your Planyard account for testing.

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Start the Free Trial
3. Activate subscription
4. Company Profile 
5. Invite Users
6. Creating a Project
7. Collect Purchase Invoices
8. Accounting Integrations
9. Advanced Settings

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Introduction

This guide covers essential settings to review when setting up your company account. You’ll find short step-by-step instructions for key setup tasks, along with links to more detailed guides on account settings and features. Follow these steps to ensure your account is ready to manage construction budgets smoothly from day one. 

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Start the Free Trial

To start your free trial, visit the Planyard website and click ‘Try it free’. No credit card details or payment information are needed to start the free trial.

Once you’ve set up the free trial, you will have immediate access to Planyard. If you forget your password, click ‘Forgot password?’ on the login screen to reset it.

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Activate Subscription

To ensure seamless access after your free trial ends, follow these steps to add your payment details:

1. Go to 'Company' in the main menu
2. Select 'Billing'
3. Click 'Manage Account'
4. Under 'Payment Methods', enter your credit card details

Company Profile

You can update your company profile, including details like company name, registration code, and logo. Information added here will automatically appear in Planyard-generated documents, such as purchase orders and bids. To adjust your company profile settings, follow these steps:

1. Click 'Company' in the top menu row.
2. Click 'Settings' on the far right of the company menu row. 
3. From here you will see several rows where you can adjust information for the company details. 

Note that only the company name is required in the company settings; however, adding additional information can enhance the professionalism of your Planyard-generated documents.

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Invite Users

Once you’ve logged in to the platform, you can invite users such as project managers, quantity surveyors, site engineers, and other team members. Here’s how to add new users to the platform:

1. Click 'Company' in the top menu row
2. Navigate to 'User Management'
3. Click 'Add User' in the top right corner
4. Add the user’s email address and select permissions
5. Click 'Create'

Considerations 

Should Users See Each Other’s Projects?

Consider whether users in your organization should access each other’s financial data, such as budgets, invoices, subcontracts, and purchase orders. Sharing this information allows team members to review subcontractor relationships and validate real-time market rates based on vendor or subcontractor pricing.

To enable users to get visual access to data from all projects without the ability to make adjustments, adjust the "View projects" permission to "Everyone’s".

If preferred, you can grant a user viewer access to a specific project. Detailed instructions on sharing projects with users are available in this guide.

Should Budgets Be Locked for Users?

Locking estimates and target budgets can increase accountability by ensuring you can track initial cost estimates and compare them with actual outcomes. This transparency helps identify items that exceeded estimates or generated profit. You can restrict this level of access to specific users, ensuring only authorized team members have editing rights while others maintain view-only permissions.

To lock the budget and prevent edits, adjust the "Edit estimates and Target budget for projects permission" to "No".

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Creating a Project

To utilise the project management workflows, you need to create a project. When clicking 'Projects' in the top menu row you will have two options, you can either create a custom project or create a demo project. 

Demo Project

Clicking ‘Create demo project’ generates a new project with a dummy budget and pre-populated items, such as an active subcontract, payment applications, and registered costs. This demo project allows you to immediately trial Planyard’s project workflow features upon login.

Create Custom Project

By creating your custom project, you add your own budget to Planyard, the most common way to do so is by utilising the budget template spreadsheet. Simply add your budget to the spreadsheet, and upload it to Planyard. 

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Collect Purchase Invoices

If you don't already have one, we recommend setting up an accounts payable email (invoices@yourdomain.com) where all the subcontractors and suppliers send invoices to get paid.

In the next step, you can have your AP inbox automatically forward invoices to Planyard. This automation ensures: 

• Seamless Invoice Handling: All invoices sent to your AP inbox are automatically uploaded to Planyard, saving you time and effort.
• No Missed Invoices: Every invoice is accounted for, reducing the risk of errors or delays in processing.
• Efficient Payment Workflows: With invoices centralized in Planyard, you can easily review, approve, and pay them without chasing emails or files.
• Improved Supplier Relationships: Faster processing and timely payments help you build trust with subcontractors and suppliers.

This is the process we'd recommend you use for collecting purchase invoices onto Planyard. However, if this approach does not suit your operation, there are options to get your invoices uploaded to Planyard:

Email Plugin

You can use Planyard’s email plugin to upload invoices directly from your inbox. This is a convenient option for handling specific invoices without setting up full automation. The plugin is available for Outlook and Gmail.

Manual Upload

For complete control or handling exceptions, you can upload invoices manually.  This option works well for infrequent invoices or those requiring special handling.

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Accounting integrations

Planyard allows for automatically forwarding approved cost documents to accounting, ensuring accuracy and efficiency in your financial workflows. The approved cost document can either be forwarded directly to the accountant’s email or sent directly to the accounting software via integrations.

This eliminates the need for manual entries across multiple platforms, saving time and reducing the risk of human error. By streamlining this process, Planyard ensures your financial records are always up to date, improves collaboration between teams, and enhances overall productivity. Additionally, the automation allows your team to focus on higher-value tasks rather than repetitive data entry, resulting in a more efficient and accurate financial workflow.

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Advanced Settings

When completed the settings above, you will have done all essential settings for getting Planyard up and running. However, there are more advanced settings that can be managed in the platform. In this guide, we will not go into greater details in setting them up. But will give you a short introduction to each feature with a link to a full guide on how to setup the settings:

Approval Workflows

Approval workflows in Planyard ensure that every cost, purchase order, and RFQ (Request for Quote) is reviewed and approved by the correct people. This helps maintain control over your project’s budget and ensures that nothing moves forward without proper authorization.

You can set up approval workflows for:

• Processing costs
• Creating and approving purchase orders
• Reviewing tenders from RFQs

White Labeling

Planyard’s white-labeling feature allows you to customize emails related to RFQs, purchase orders, and payment application requests to reflect your company’s branding. By integrating your email provider, these communications appear as if sent directly from your company, enhancing professionalism, building trust with recipients, and ensuring seamless, branded interactions.