Your first week on Complywerk: from empty workspace to client portal in five steps

You have activated your workspace and you are looking at an empty dashboard. This guide is the order of operations we recommend for the first week, based on the workspaces that got productive fastest. Five steps, roughly in dependency order: brand the workspace, adopt the rules for your countries, import your client book, invite your team, and open the first client portal. Each step below tells you where to click, what you should see when it worked, and the mistake we most often see at that step.

Step 1 — Put your brand on it (10 minutes)

Go to Settings in the left navigation. The first card is 'Tenant & branding'. Two fields matter: 'Logo URL' and 'Primary brand colour'. Paste a public https link to your logo, pick or type your brand colour as a hex value, and press 'Save settings'. The change is immediate — the toast confirms 'Brand colour and logo take effect immediately', and everything your clients will later see in the portal carries your brand, not ours.

What you should see: a live logo preview under the URL field, and the interface accent colour switching to yours on save.

Common pitfalls: the logo must be a publicly reachable http(s) URL — a link that needs a login (a file in your intranet or a private Drive) will show 'The logo image failed to load'. And note the deliberate limit of the white-label scope: only the logo and primary colour are replaceable; the four status colours (green/amber/red and friends) are locked globally so that a red deadline means the same thing in every tenant. Don't spend time looking for a way to restyle those — there isn't one, on purpose.

Step 2 — Adopt the rules for your countries (15 minutes)

Open Rules in the navigation. You will see the platform rule packs — one per country × compliance stream (German packaging, UK packaging EPR, French WEEE, and so on), each versioned and marked 'AI-researched' or 'Expert verified'. Nothing applies to your clients until you adopt it: find each rule pack for the countries you serve and press 'Adopt'. The confirmation toast names the version you adopted and adds 'action logged' — every adoption is written to the audit trail with a date, because which rule version you were operating under is itself compliance evidence.

What you should see: the Adoption column filling with 'Adopted' badges for your countries, and later — once clients exist — the dashboard's coverage check going quiet.

Common pitfall: adopting only the countries you think of first. The dashboard has a coverage-gap warning that lists clients with country × stream cells no adopted rule covers — the system has not evaluated those obligations, which does not mean none exist. Treat that warning as a to-do list, not an FYI. Adopt before you import, and the import lands into a workspace that can immediately evaluate what each client owes.

Step 3 — Import your client book from CSV (an afternoon)

On the Clients page, press 'Import'. This opens the 'Bulk import' wizard, which walks four steps — 'Upload file', 'Map columns', 'Validate & preview', 'Import result' — and supports four kinds of objects: Clients, Products, Registration numbers, and Historical filings. Import in that order: clients first, then their products, then the registration numbers that attach to registration obligations, then any historical filings you want on the timeline.

What you should see: after upload, a mapping table with your spreadsheet's columns on one side and target fields on the other (map once, then 'Save as template' so the next batch is one click); after validation, a count of valid rows, error rows and duplicates. The commit button says 'Confirm import' with the row count — and this is the promise the wizard makes: nothing is written until a human confirms.

Common pitfalls: error rows are skipped, not fixed silently — use 'Download error rows CSV', fix the listed reasons (row numbers match Excel, header included), and import the corrected batch to fill the gap. And leave 'Skip duplicate rows' on unless you know why you're turning it off, or same-name records will import as new files.

Step 4 — Invite your team with the right roles (20 minutes)

Back in Settings, find the 'Team members' card and press 'Invite member'. Enter a name, an email and a role, then 'Send invitation'. The invitee gets a link to set their own password; the link is valid for 24 hours, and sending a new invite invalidates the old one — so if someone reports a dead link, just use 'Resend invite'.

The four roles, in one line each:

• Owner — exactly one per workspace; the only role that can transfer ownership, and the account of last resort.
• Admin — runs the workspace: settings, branding, members and rules, everything except ownership itself.
• Specialist — does the compliance work: owns clients, gets the tasks that due filings derive, files the filings.
• Viewer — read-only; right for accountants, auditors or anyone who should see status but change nothing.

Common pitfall: making everyone an admin 'for now'. Assign specialists as the owner specialist on their clients instead — the workload dashboard, task assignment and the 'My clients' view all key off that field, and none of them work if everyone is an admin who owns nothing. Complywerk prices per managed client, not per seat, so inviting your whole team costs nothing extra.

Step 5 — Open the first client portal (10 minutes per client)

Open a client's detail page and find the 'Portal account' card. Enter the client contact's email and press 'Open account', then 'Generate login link'. The portal is passwordless: the client signs in via a magic link — generated on demand, valid for 24 hours, emailed automatically (and copyable if you want to test it yourself first). No password to set, no credentials for a busy seller to lose.

What the client sees is the point of steps 1–4: a portal under your logo and your brand colour, showing their compliance status, and receiving their document uploads straight into your review queue. When you later send a material request, the email carries an upload link into that same branded portal — data collection becomes a workflow instead of an inbox chase.

Common pitfall: generating a link and assuming the client got in. The portal card shows 'Last login' or 'Never logged in' per account — check it after the first send, and if the link expired before they clicked, generate a fresh one; it costs nothing and invalidates the old link.

FAQ

How is my clients' data isolated from other agencies?

Every tenant's data is isolated at the database layer with row-level security (RLS) — isolation is enforced on every query by the database itself, not by application convention.

Can we run it on our own servers?

Yes — for agencies with strict data-sovereignty requirements, Complywerk can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure, with no subprocessors and no data leaving your environment.

Who does the migration from our spreadsheets?

We do it with you: the import wizard covers the four object types above, and onboarding includes a guided migration session where we map your existing spreadsheets together — you are not handed a template and wished luck.

A realistic first-week plan: steps 1–2 on day one, step 3 across a day or two as you clean your source spreadsheets, step 4 as soon as the data is in, and step 5 for your three most engaged clients first. See the product overview for what each area does in depth.