Set up your organisation

A handful of settings sit above every project you'll ever create in Monument: the currency money is counted in, how dates read, when the financial year turns over, what's printed on an invoice, and the margin a job is measured against. Set them once, correctly, and everything downstream inherits them without a second thought.

This is setup work for Northlight Architects, an Australian practice, so the numbers below land in Australian dollars, on a July financial year, with the firm's own details ready to print.

Defaults cascade down, they don't lock anything

Picture Monument in layers, with the organisation at the very top.

The organisation sets the default; anything more specific can override it. Firm-wide currency, formats and project defaults apply everywhere unless told otherwise. A person can change how dates and numbers display for them without touching anyone else's view, and a single project can carry its own target margin. Everything else just inherits, quietly, without anyone configuring it.

Get it right once, and you stop correcting it forever. Because these values cascade, a currency symbol or a financial-year boundary set wrong here means fixing it on every report later, one at a time. Nail the organisation and the rest of Monument follows.

Region and formatting

Stay on the Region & Formatting tab first. The Country field does the heavy lifting: pick one and Monument suggests a sensible timezone, currency, number and date format, and financial-year start together. Nothing here is locked; change any of them by hand afterwards if your firm is the exception.

1. 1

   Open Settings and select the Region & Formatting tab.

2. 2

   Set Country to Australia. Monument fills in the timezone, base currency (AUD), DD/MM/YYYY dates and a July financial year.

3. 3

   Check the Base Currency, the one figures, invoices and reports are actually counted in.

4. 4

   Under Formatting Defaults, confirm Number Format, Date Format and Week Starts On, each with a live preview showing exactly how values will read.

Financial year

Architecture practices rarely run on a calendar year, and reports like profitability and utilisation bucket by your financial year, not January to December. Set the start date so those numbers line up with how the practice actually accounts.

1. 1

   In the Financial Year section, set Financial Year Starts with the day and month pickers.

2. 2

   For Northlight Architects, that's 1 July. (A UK firm might pick 6 April; a US firm, 1 January.)

3. 3

   Click Save on the settings bar to commit region and financial-year changes.

   

Branding

Switch to Branding. Everything here shows up on what clients actually see: invoices, quotes, purchase orders, reports. Set it once, and it prints correctly from then on.

1. 1

   On the Branding tab, upload the Organisation Logo (PNG, JPG or SVG, up to 2MB).

2. 2

   Fill in Document Details: Business Address, Phone, Email and Website.

3. 3

   Enter your ABN (or local tax number) so it appears on tax invoices.

4. 4

   Click Save.

Project defaults

Move to Application and find Project Defaults, the starting values every new project inherits, so nobody retypes the same numbers on job after job.

• Target Profit Margin: the margin a project is measured against. Fall below it, and the project flags itself, so weak jobs surface without anyone going looking.
• Default Hours Per Day: what Monument uses to turn a resource allocation into hours, eight a day for a full-time booking, for example.

1. 1

   On the Application tab, set Target Profit Margin (for example, 20%).

2. 2

   Set Default Hours Per Day (for example, 8).

3. 3

   Save. Every new project now starts from these values.

Where personal preferences fit in

Organisation defaults decide how the firm runs; personal preferences decide how things display for one person. On the Personal tab, someone can override their interface language, timezone, number format, date format and week start, useful for a colleague working across a different timezone to the firm. Leave a field blank and it inherits the organisation default; Reset to Organisation Defaults clears every override in one click.

This is display-only. Changing a personal date format never changes anyone else's data, just how it reads on that person's own screen.

Troubleshooting

• Nothing saves until you click Save. Region, Branding and Project Defaults each sit behind their own save bar, so edits stay pending until committed, and Discard reverts to what's stored. Navigate away mid-edit, and the changes are lost.
• Country suggests, it doesn't lock. Picking a country only proposes timezone, currency and formats. Bill in a currency different from where you're based, and change Base Currency by hand afterward.
• Different date formats on a screenshare aren't a bug. That's the Personal tab doing its job, a per-user display setting, not a discrepancy in the underlying data.

Where this fits next

Currency, dates and margins are all correct now. Next, make Monument speak your firm's own language in Customise Monument: custom fields, your own task statuses and types, and the numbering patterns for project codes and invoices.