Getting started full guide
This is the short version of how to go from "I just signed up" to "my crew are looking at the live run sheet on their phones". It links out to the deeper articles whenever a step has its own page, so treat this as the map and the longer articles as the territory.
The whole flow takes about ten minutes for your first event. You will spend more time on the next ones only because you have more crew to add. Once your address book is built up, a new event from scratch is closer to two or three minutes.
Step 1. Create your account
Go to 1pm.app and click Create account. You need an email address and a password of at least eight characters. No credit card. No "verify your phone". Your 30-day free trial starts the moment you finish signup.
You will get two emails within a minute: a short welcome, and a six-digit verification code. Verifying is optional but recommended because it enables sending run of show links directly to crew from within 1pm.
Step 2. Sign in and look around
After signup you land on the events list at 1pm.app/Events. This is your home page in 1pm. From here you can create events, jump into the run of show for any one of them, manage your crew and branding, and look after billing.
The top navigation has five sections you will use regularly:
Events at 1pm.app/Events. The page you are looking at. Every event you create lives here.
Crew at 1pm.app/Crew. Your address book of the people you work with. In 1pm we use "crew" and "vendor" interchangeably because "crew" reads more naturally on event day.
Branding at 1pm.app/Branding. Optional. Custom colors and logos that change how your crew see the live run sheet. Useful if you run events under a studio name or want the crew view to feel like the client's brand.
Billing at 1pm.app/Billing. Your subscription, payment method, plan, and invoices. Handled through Stripe's secure customer portal.
Your email address and a Sign out link. The email is read-only so you can confirm which account you are signed in as.
On a phone the navigation collapses into a hamburger menu icon in the top right. Same items, just stacked.
Step 3. Add a few crew members
In 1pm anyone who needs access to the run of show is entered as ‘Crew’. This could be staff, assistants, guest speakers, clients, customers, suppliers, vendors etc. We just call them crew because they are all working in some capacity ‘in’ the event and not just an invited guest (although they may well also be guest).
You can do this before or after you create your first event. Doing it first means you can pick crew from a dropdown as you build the event rather than coming back to fill them in.
Open Crew in the top navigation. Click New crew. The fields you fill in:
First name. Required. The only required field. Everything else can be filled in as you go.
Last name, Business or group, Email, Mobile. Optional. The email is what makes the "Email link" button on share links work without typing the address every time. The mobile is for crew you might want to call from the briefing card on event day.
Tag. Optional but useful. A short label like Photographer, DJ, Caterer, Venue, MC, Cake. Used later to filter your Crew page and to group submissions on event-wide requests.
Save. Add the rest of your common suppliers/vendors/crew/staff the same way. If you have an existing list in a spreadsheet, the Crew page also has a CSV import option at 1pm.app/Crew/Import that handles a few dozen rows at once.
See Adding crew, and Importing crew from a CSV if you have a spreadsheet to pull in.
Step 4. Create your first event
From the events list, click New event in the top right. An inline form opens at the top of the list.
The required fields are name, date, and status. Everything else is optional and can be filled in later.
Name. Short enough to read at a glance. "Smith and Lee Wedding", "Q3 Sales Kickoff", "Spring Gala 2026".
Date. The day the event happens. For multi-day events, the date here is the main day; individual timeline items can be on different days.
Status. Where this event sits in your pipeline. Options are Enquiry, Tentative, Confirmed, Cancelled, and Completed. Status is just a label, it does not change behavior — you use it to filter the events list and to keep track of what is where in your sales process.
PAX, Space, Client, Organizer. The briefing fields. PAX is your guest count. Space is the room or venue area. Client and Organizer are pulled from your Crew list — the Client is who hired you, the Organizer is the day-of point of contact (often a different person).
Branding theme. Only appears if you have set up at least one theme. Picks the colors and logo your crew see on the live link.
Save. The new event appears at the top of the events list. Click into it to open the planner.
See Add and event to 1pm for the full breakdown.
Step 5. Build the timeline
The planner is where the run of show lives. Down the page you will see the event header, a Notes accordion for day-of info, accordions for Files, Links, Share, and Requests, and below those the timeline table itself.
There are two ways to add timeline items.
Type them in directly. Use the Add item form at the bottom of the timeline. Each item has a date (defaults to the event date), a start time, a duration in minutes, a title, an optional Where (location), an optional Details field, and a Responsible crew member. The form is persistent — after each save it clears the title, details, and responsible fields so you can rapid-fire entries.
Paste in from an existing document. If the timeline already exists in a Word document, a spreadsheet, or an email, click Paste in run of show. The parser handles lines like "9am Hair and makeup", "2:30pm - 3:15pm Ceremony", "6:00pm Reception entrance" and turns them into timeline items in one go. After previewing what 1pm understood, click Add.
Either way, you can adjust each item inline once it is on the timeline. Click into the title to edit, click into the time to adjust, drag the handle on the left to reorder.
See Timeline items for the editor in detail, and Pasting in a run of show for the import flow.
Step 6. Assign crew to their items
For each timeline item, click into the Responsible field and pick the crew member who owns that slot. The photographer is responsible for the photo blocks. The DJ is responsible for the music slots. The celebrant is responsible for the ceremony.
A crew member does not have to be responsible for everything they touch. Assigning a crew member to an item means that item is what they see in their highlighted list on the share link. Items they are not assigned to still appear on their share link as context, just without action buttons for them.
See Assigning crew to timeline items for the longer version.
Step 7. Share the live link
Open the Share accordion on the planner page. Every crew member who has at least one item assigned shows up in the list, plus anyone you have manually added for run sheet access.
Click Generate link next to a crew member. 1pm creates a unique tokenized URL just for that person. Three ways to share it:
Email link. The fastest option. The crew member's email is pre-filled if you saved one on their crew record. Click Email link and 1pm sends a short email with the URL.
Copy link. Click the copy icon to put the URL on your clipboard. Paste it into WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, your own email, wherever you usually reach that crew member.
Open in new tab. Click the external-link icon to open the run sheet exactly as that crew member would see it. The fastest way to sanity-check who is assigned to what before you send.
There is no app to download, no login, no password. The link works on any phone with a browser.
See Sharing the live link, What crew see when they open the link, and The public shareable runsheet for a single read-only link for the whole event (useful for the venue or the client).
Step 8. Run the day
On event day, each crew member opens their share link. They see the event briefing (PAX, space, client contact), any "Important notes" you have added, their personal notes if you wrote any, and the full timeline with their own items highlighted.
The current item shows a red Now indicator. Items about to start show a "Starts in N sec" countdown band in the final 99 seconds before their scheduled time. Each crew member taps Start when they begin their activity and Mark finished when they are done, or a single Done button if you have configured the simpler tracking model on the event.
If anything changes mid-event, you adjust the timeline on your phone or laptop and every crew member's link updates within a few seconds.
See Real-time updates, How crew mark items on the run of show, and Working offline at the venue for what happens when venue Wi-Fi drops.
Optional next steps
These are the features most planners adopt once the basics are working. None of them are required for a first event.
Branding at 1pm.app/Branding. Set up a theme with your accent color and logo. Apply it to events to give crew a branded view instead of generic 1pm chrome. See Branding your crew view and A fully branded workspace.
Requests. Chase certificates, meal preferences, backup contact numbers, anything you would normally email people for. Per-crew requests live in each crew member's row in the planner. Event-wide requests at 1pm.app/Requests go to every crew member at once and submissions group by name. See Asking crew for documents and info and Asking everyone for the same thing.
File attachments. Upload PDFs and images (floor plans, seating charts, cake references) or link out to where the document already lives (Google Drive, Dropbox). Files can be attached to the whole event or to a single timeline item. See Attaching files and Uploading files direct to an event.
Personal notes per crew member. A private brief that only one crew member sees. Useful for sensitive requests ("vegan main is for table 4 seat 3", "do not play any Ed Sheeran"). See Personal notes for each crew member.
Account profile at 1pm.app/Account/Profile. Set the display name that appears in your navbar and on outgoing share-link emails. Manage two-factor authentication if you want it on the account.
Where to go from here
The full searchable help library is at 1pm Planner Help.
If you are running a specific event type, the wedding day walkthrough article works through a single end-to-end example from enquiry to send-off and is the most copy-paste-able starting point. The same shape works for corporate events, conferences, and galas with minor swaps.
If anything in here did not work the way the article describes, email [email protected]. A real person reads that inbox and we would love to hear from you.
