Your first days

When you start ORCA at orca-crm.com/start, your account opens the moment you agree the price. There's no card to give and nobody you have to speak to. Your free month starts that day.

The first-days guide

Your dashboard opens with Your first days: the steps most organisations take first. Do them in any order, at your own pace. Each one ticks itself off when it's really done, however you did it: by hand, by import, through the API, or with our help.

• See one like yours. One click takes you into the demo account nearest to your kind of work, such as Brackwater Fabrication for construction or Clyde Commons Initiative for a charity. Nothing in a demo can be changed, and a bar at the bottom takes you back. See Demo accounts.
• Make it look like yours. Your logo and colours. See Name, logo and colours.
• Use your own words, if you started from a ready-made setup. If you say "enquiries" rather than "tenders", rename the section and its fields. If you started from a clean ORCA, the step is Make a section for what you keep. See Creating sections.
• Bring your list in. Import companies and contacts from a spreadsheet, matching its columns to ORCA's. Or email the spreadsheet to hello@orca-crm.com and we'll do it.
• Add your team. Everyone within your plan costs nothing extra. See Accounts & Users.
• Log a first conversation. BCC comms@orca-crm.com on an email to someone already in ORCA, and it's filed with them.
• Add a card, by the date shown, so ORCA carries on. See Your plan.

Only admins see the guide, for the first 30 days. Put away hides it, and Settings > Your plan brings it back.

If your account is read-only because no card has been added yet, the guide shows just that one step: Add a card to start.

Handing it to an AI agent

If you'd rather an AI agent such as Claude did the setting up, open Rather hand it to an AI agent? at the foot of the guide, or go to Settings > API Keys. There's a prompt ready to copy. Give it to your agent with an API key, and it will read the reference, show you its plan in plain words, and wait for your go-ahead before it builds sections or imports anything. See Using the ORCA API.

Would a hand help?

Whenever you'd like help setting up, or your data brought across, ask from Settings > Your plan and we'll email you within a working day to find a time. You never have to. A few components, such as the site clock, are set up with you; if you choose one of those, we get in touch anyway.