Getting started — Help

Welcome to 1pm. This is the map from "I just signed up" to "1pm is running my events", laid out in the order you would actually work through it. Each step tells you what to do, links straight to the screen you do it on, and says whether it is worth doing now or can wait. The deeper how-to articles are linked as you go, so treat this page as the map and those as the territory.

You do not have to do all of it. The essentials get you to a live event in about ten minutes. Everything after that (getting booked, getting paid, menus and costing, branding and reports) is there when you are ready for it, not before.

Which parts apply to you?

1pm serves two audiences, event professionals and venues, and the setup shares one spine. Skim the note that fits you, then start at the essentials. You can always come back for the rest.

You are an event professional (planner, photographer, AV, celebrant). Do the essentials. You may not have fixed rooms, so treat Spaces as reusable locations (a park, a client's home, a hired hall) or skip them at first. Proposals and getting paid tend to matter more to you than a room list does.
You run a venue (hotel, restaurant with function space, dedicated event space). Same essentials, then set up capturing enquiries so website leads stop living in a shared inbox, and getting paid so quotes, confirmations, and invoices run through 1pm. Your rooms become Spaces.
You are a caterer or run a kitchen. Everything above, plus the part built for you: reusable menus, and ingredient and recipe costing so you know the plate cost, food-cost percentage, and margin on every dish before you quote it.

Whoever you are, start here.

Part 1: The essentials

These are the steps that get you to a live event. Everyone does them.

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 phone verification. Your 30-day free trial starts the moment you finish signup.

Within a minute you will get two emails: a short welcome, and a six-digit verification code. Verifying is optional but recommended. The only thing you give up by skipping it is self-service password reset, which becomes a manual support email later instead. See Signing up for the full walkthrough and Verifying your email address for the code step.

Now or later: do this now, obviously. Verification can wait a few minutes, but do it before you forget.

Step 2. Sign in and look around

You land on Leads: the enquiries waiting on a reply. Navigation lives in a drawer down the left edge of every page. The entries you will use day to day:

Leads. Enquiries from your website forms, worked as a pipeline from first contact to booked. Where you land at sign-in, and it badges anything waiting on you.
Events. Every booking you create.
Calendar. The same bookings as a month, week, or day view.
Contacts. Your address book of clients, suppliers, and the crew you put on events. (In 1pm "contact" and "crew" are the same record. A contact becomes crew the moment you assign them to an event.)
Spaces. Your rooms and reusable locations, each with its own address and access notes.

Your account menu sits top-right of the navbar: Account (subscription and billing), Team (sharing with a colleague), Help, and Sign out. The sidebar also holds Onboarding, Programs, Tasks, Automations, Branding, Files, Fields, Requests, Invoices, Items, Reports, Emails and Terms, ready when you need them, plus the Menus, Ingredients and Recipes group on the Hospitality plan. On a phone the sidebar tucks behind a hamburger at top-left and the account items behind a three-dot menu at top-right.

See Working the leads inbox and The sidebar and where everything lives for the longer look.

Step 3. Set your business identity

Open your profile and set the display name that appears in your navbar and on the emails 1pm sends on your behalf. While you are there you can adjust the wording 1pm uses for "run of show" and for "Space", so the app speaks your house language.

If you want your logo and colors on the pages clients and crew see, set up a theme in Branding. It carries onto share links, proposals, and portals.

Now or later: the display name is worth thirty seconds now. Branding can wait until just before you send something client-facing. See Your profile and display name and A fully branded workspace.

Step 4. Add your Spaces

A Space is any reusable place an event happens: a venue room, an outdoor area, a park, a client's home. Each carries its own address, access notes (parking, gate codes, dock access), and capacity. A real venue with several rooms is modelled as several Spaces, one per room, each with its own address.

Click New space and fill in the name and address. Add access notes if crew will need them on the day.

Now or later: venues should add their rooms now, because you will pick a Space as you create events. Event professionals without fixed rooms can add locations as they come up, or skip this entirely at first. See Spaces: saving and reusing venues.

Step 5. Add a few contacts

Building Contacts first means you can pick people from a dropdown while creating an event instead of coming back later. Click New contact. Only First name is required; Last name, Company, Email, and Mobile are optional but useful (the email powers the one-click "Email link" button on share links). A Tag like Caterer, AV, Florist, or Duty manager lets you filter later and group submissions on event-wide requests.

If you already keep a list in a spreadsheet, use Import CSV to bring in a few dozen rows at once.

Now or later: add your regular suppliers now if you have them handy; otherwise add people as events need them. See Adding contacts, Importing contacts from a CSV, and Tagging contacts.

Step 6. Create your first event

From Events, click New event. The required fields are name, date, and status; everything else can wait.

Name. Short enough to read at a glance: "Patel Wedding", "Q3 Sales Kickoff", "Rooftop NYE Dinner".
Date. The main day of the event.
Status. Where the booking sits in your pipeline: Enquiry, Tentative, Confirmed, Cancelled, or Completed.
Pax, Space, Value, Zone, Client, Organizer. The briefing fields. Pax is your guest count. Space is the room or location. Zone is a sub-area within a larger Space ("east wing", "stage left"). Client and Organizer come from your Contacts.

Save, then open it with Edit portal, the orange button with the globe on the event's row. If the booking came in through a website enquiry form, do not start from scratch: convert the lead and its details carry across (see getting booked).

Two buttons sit on every event row and they are worth telling apart on day one. Settings reopens the form you just filled in: the name, date, status, and briefing fields. Edit portal opens the event itself, the live page holding the run of show, the crew and their share links, the requests, and the files. It is the surface your crew and clients actually work in, and the globe means exactly that. If you also run Onboarding portals, this is the same pair of buttons for the same reason: a portal and an event are the same kind of thing, a live page you fill in and share.

See Creating your first event and Event details and the briefing.

Step 7. Build the run of show and BEO

The planner holds the run of show (ROS): the minute-by-minute timeline for the day. Two ways to fill it:

Type it in. Click Add first item, then edit in place. Each row has a start time, a duration, a title, an optional Where, a Details field, and a Responsible crew member. Press Tab from Duration to drop a fresh row below, ready to type.
Paste it in. If the timeline already exists in a document, spreadsheet, or email, click Paste in. 1pm parses lines like "6:00pm - 6:45pm Canapes and arrival drinks" into rows in one go.

The one-page department brief, the BEO (service style, setup style, dietary and menu summary, bar package, plus the access-from and vacate-by load-in window), is built from these same event fields. See Run of show items, Pasting in a run of show, and Editing the run of show inline.

Step 8. Assign crew and share the live link

For each timeline item, pick the Responsible crew member. That is what puts the item in that person's highlighted list on their share link (they still see the rest of the timeline as context). See Assigning crew to ROS items.

Open the Share accordion. Every crew member with at least one item shows up. Click Generate link to mint a unique tokenized URL for that person, then Email link (fastest, if you saved their email), Copy link, or open it in a new tab to preview exactly what they will see. No app, no login, no password. See Sharing the live link, What crew see, and The public shareable runsheet for one read-only link covering the whole event.

Step 9. Run the day

On event day, each crew member opens their link and sees the briefing, any important notes, their personal notes, and the full timeline with their items highlighted. The current item shows a red Now indicator. They tap Start and Mark finished as they go. Change the timeline on your phone or laptop and every open link updates within seconds. See Real-time updates, How crew mark items, and Working offline at the venue for when the Wi-Fi drops.

That is a complete event, start to finish. Everything below is 1pm growing with you.

Part 2: Getting booked (Leads)

Most bookings start as an enquiry, and 1pm can capture those so they stop living in a shared inbox nobody owns. This matters most for venues and planners taking inbound work.

Under Leads, open Lead Types and build an enquiry form: choose the fields, word it in your own voice, then copy the embed snippet into your website (Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, and most builders support it). Every submission drops into your Leads inbox, tagged to the form it came from.

From the inbox you work each lead as a pipeline: read it, reply, and when it is real, convert it into an event with the contact details and answers carried across. Save your common replies once under Reply templates, with merge fields like [first name] and [event date] that fill in per send.

Now or later: set the form up once your essentials are working and you want inbound enquiries flowing in. See Capturing enquiries with a form, Working the leads inbox, Replying to leads, and Turning a lead into an event.

Part 3: Getting paid (quotes, invoices, payments)

When you are ready to price work and take money, set the money defaults once, then it runs per event.

Tax and invoice defaults. Set your tax rate (GST, VAT, or sales tax) and invoice defaults in Tax and invoicing. This is also where service charges and gratuities are configured.
Terms and conditions. Keep your booking terms in the Terms library, snapshotted onto each confirmation so you always know which version a client agreed to.
Online card payments. Connect your own Stripe account in Online payments. A Pay now button then appears on invoices you share, and the money goes straight to your Stripe balance. 1pm takes no cut.

Per event, price it on the event's pricing tab, reusing lines from your items catalog. From there you send a quote, turn it into a booking confirmation, and raise an invoice, taking a deposit now and the balance later if you like. Recorded payments (bank transfer, cash, or card) track the balance down to zero automatically.

Now or later: only needed when you are about to send your first quote or invoice. Skip it until then. See Pricing an event, Your items catalog and packages, Quotes and invoices, Event confirmations, Deposits and balances, and Getting paid.

Planners and photographers who lead with a designed pitch rather than a bare quote should look at Proposals: a drag-and-drop, branded document hosted at its own link.

Part 4: For caterers and kitchens

This is the part built for the food side of the operation. If you do not plate food, skip it.

Menus. Build reusable food and beverage menus once and pull them onto events. The output is a real, client-facing menu, not just an internal list, and it can carry your own fonts and branding. See Food and beverage menus and Collecting dietary requirements.
Ingredient and recipe costing. Keep an ingredient price list, build costed recipes from it, and 1pm works out the plate cost, food-cost percentage, and gross margin on every dish. This is the number that tells you whether a menu makes money before you quote it. See Costed ingredients, Building costed recipes, Plate cost, food cost and margin, and the end-to-end recipe costing walkthrough.

Now or later: menus are worth setting up early if food is central to what you sell. Costing is a back-of-house discipline you can adopt whenever you want to tighten margins.

Part 5: Polish and scale

The features most people adopt once the basics are humming. None are required.

Calendar sync. Publish a read-only feed of your bookings into Google, Outlook, or Apple Calendar from Calendar sync. See Syncing your calendar.
Requests. Chase certificates, meal preferences, and backup numbers instead of emailing for them, one to one on a crew member's row or to everyone at once from the Requests dashboard. See The Requests dashboard.
Files. Attach floor plans, seating charts, and run sheets to an event or a single timeline item, or link out to where they already live.
Team. Share your account with a colleague from Team. See Working with a team.
Two-factor authentication. Turn on 2FA to lock down the account.
Reports. Once bookings are flowing, Reports covers revenue, leads and conversion, deposits, tax, space utilization, catering covers, food cost, and more, each exportable to CSV. See Reports.

Where to go from here

The full help library covers one feature at a time, and the what's new page tracks recent updates.

If you want a single worked example rather than a map, the corporate event walkthrough and the wedding day walkthrough each take one booking from enquiry to send-off, and they are the most copy-paste-able starting points. The same shape works for gala dinners, private dining, and conferences with minor swaps.

If anything here did not work the way it is described, email [email protected]. A real person reads that inbox.