First Steps with Projects

Prerequisite Tasks

To take your first steps setting up your projects in Hiro, you'll need to have completed the initial onboarding tasks:

1. Organisational Setup
   Setup your organisational structures and settings to tailor Hiro to your business.
   
   
2. User Setup
   Setup your hourly rates and user privileges, then invite others in your organisation to also access Hiro.
   
   
3. Customise Branding
   Set the look and feel of the documents that will get produced from Hiro to align to your company branding, e.g., for your invoice PDFs.

Get Running with your First Project

To create your first project in Hiro:

1. Connect Xero [optional]
   To enable your contact and invoice information to sync with Xero, you will need to establish a connection from Hiro to Xero first.
   
   This article gives an overview of how Hiro integrates with Xero and what data gets synced between the two platforms. The specific steps how to link Hiro to Xero can be found here.
   
   
2. Create or Import Address Book Contacts
   All projects in Hiro must have a billing entity specified (the person or company who gets invoiced for your work).
   
   You specify the billing entity for a project either when you first create the project, or afterwards via the Update Billing Entity page. To create new billing entities, add a contact in the Address Book.
   
   Learn more about how the Address Book works in this article.
   
   Either company contacts or individual contacts who are not linked to a company can be used as billing entities.
   
   To create Address Book contacts from scratch, navigate to the Address Book module and click the "New contact" button.
   
   You can alternatively bulk import your contacts using the Import Contacts section within the Settings module (learn more how this works here).
   
   
3. Setup Work Schedule Templates [optional]
   A work schedule gets added to every job in Hiro, which enables you to track your agreed fee structure for your project versus the amount of time and costs accrued to each component of your fee structure.
   
   Learn more about what a Work Schedule is and how it works here.
   
   Whilst you can create a new Work Schedule from scratch each time you add a new project to Hiro, you can also setup reusable templates. When you create a new project, you can then input the template, and still modify any details specific to that project thereafter.
   
   Learn more about how to setup Work Schedule Templates in this article.
   
   
4. Lodge Project
   Adding a new project to Hiro is called "lodgement". There are two types of projects that you can lodge in Hiro:
   
   
   • enquiry - a type of project yet to be given authority to proceed by your client
   • job (a project that has been marked as successful and will be billed to a client
     
     Learn more about how projects work in Hiro in this article.
     
     You lodge new projects via the Projects module of Hiro, either using the New Enquiry page or the New Job (without enquiry) page. You can later "convert" an enquiry into a job by visiting the Convert Enquiry page.
     
     
     
     
5. Add Timesheets
   Once your new project has been lodged, you can start accruing timesheets to it. Timesheets can be added to a project within the Timesheets module of Hiro.
   
   This article provides an overview of how Timesheets work in Hiro.
   
   
6. Invoice your Client
   When you're ready to send an invoice to your client, visit the Invoices section of Hiro.
   
   Learn more about how invoicing works in Hiro with our series of three introductory videos:
   
   
   • Intro to Invoicing in Hiro
   • Create your First Invoice
   • Invoice your Project using a Work Schedule