Explore a demo company

A brand-new scratch organisation starts with the people, roles, templates, salaries, overheads and revenue target you set up in the wizard, but no projects, no invoices and nothing logged. That's the right starting point for your real firm, but it's a poor place to learn Monument, because there's no actual work on screen to point at. A demo company solves that: it's a real organisation, built the same way any other one is, except Monument fills it with projects, staff, invoices and time before you ever click into it.

Why a demo company matters

Think of it as a sandbox, not a rehearsal space. It isn't practice for the real thing you'll redo later, it's a separate, disposable organisation that behaves exactly like your firm's would, sitting alongside it under the same login. You can open a project, resource a task, raise an invoice, or delete the whole organisation afterwards, and none of it touches your real firm's data, because it isn't the same organisation at all.

That separation is what makes it safe to explore hard. A fresh real organisation punishes experimentation, since anything you create is something you'll have to clean up later. A demo company is generated from the industries and people, team and office counts you answer with, with varied sample details, so what you see is representative rather than precious, and nothing you break in it matters.

Build the demo company

You land on the setup wizard with nothing built yet. Rather than naming your own firm and placing your own team, choose the demo path and answer a couple of short steps instead.

1. 1

   On the wizard's first step, choose Demo company.

2. 2

   Name this example Meridian Studio and review the country and region. Continue to the work profile, choose Architecture and enter four people, one team and one office.

3. 3

   Click Create demo company.

The demo path stops at the work profile: it never asks for office or team names, roles, templates or staff. Monument generates all of that for you, matching the exact people, team and office counts you answered with.

Watch Monument build it

Clicking Create demo company doesn't hand you an empty shell while a spinner runs. Monument starts building a complete organisation, the generated demo company, from your work-profile answers, with varied sample details, so what you see is representative rather than precious.

1. 1

   Monument shows a progress view while it builds the generated demo company. You can't leave this page or start another build until it finishes.

2. 2

   When it finishes, Monument activates the generated demo company and lands you inside it automatically, no extra click required.

Where you land

You come in on the dashboard, already inside the generated demo company rather than the setup wizard, and the account menu at the bottom of the rail shows it marked Active. Everything else in Monument is already populated. Open Schedule to find projects laid out in stages. This tutorial uses Cedar Row Apartments; your generated sample names may differ. Open Invoicing for sample invoices tied to those projects, or Time for hours logged against real tasks. It's a firm mid-way through its year, not a blank form waiting to be filled in.

That's the point of exploring here first: every other getting-started article and feature walkthrough makes far more sense once you've seen what a lived-in organisation looks like, rather than trying to picture it from an empty one.

Troubleshooting

• The work profile decides the size, not a preset. There's no Small, Medium or Large choice; the industries and people, team and office counts you enter set how much sample data Monument generates.
• The build takes a little while. Monument generates real projects, people, invoices and time entries rather than copying a static snapshot, so give it a moment even though the progress view is on screen the whole time.
• A demo company still counts as an organisation. It shows up under Your Organisations alongside a real firm, so check which one is marked Active if you land somewhere unexpected.
• Deleting it is fine, and permanent. Nothing in a demo company is real, so delete it whenever you're done exploring.

Where this fits next

You're inside a fully populated organisation now. Find your way around Monument next, using the generated demo company's real projects and invoices as your map. When you're ready to stop exploring and set up your actual firm, create your workspace walks through naming it and switching in.