Getting started

The first-run setup wizard that creates your company, and the Implementation Hub that guides a new company from an empty tenant to live on Carbon.

Getting started on Carbon has two distinct surfaces. The setup wizard runs once, right after you sign up: it creates the company record, your profile, and the address that becomes your first location, then hands you a working tenant. The Implementation Hub is the checklist that takes it from there — a step-by-step map from that empty tenant to your team running production on Carbon. The wizard is unavoidable; the Hub is opt-in, and a company enrolls itself.

The setup wizard

A brand-new account has no company yet, so Carbon holds you in /onboarding until one exists. The layout loader treats onboarding as complete only when the company has a name and at least one location — there is no onboarded boolean, the presence of those two facts is the gate (apps/erp/app/routes/onboarding+/_layout.tsx:33-44). Until then, every step redirects back into the wizard.

The steps run in a fixed order (apps/erp/app/utils/path.ts:2103-2109):

Theme. Pick a color theme (zinc, neutral, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or violet). This is a cosmetic choice stored in a cookie, not the database (apps/erp/app/routes/onboarding+/theme.tsx; validator at apps/erp/app/modules/settings/settings.models.ts:306-311).

Your profile. First name and last name, both required. They write to your user record (apps/erp/app/routes/onboarding+/user.tsx; validator onboardingUserValidator at apps/erp/app/modules/account/account.models.ts:12-17).

Company. The substantive step. It collects the company name, a full address (address line 1 and 2, city, state or province, postal code, country), a base currency, and an optional website (apps/erp/app/routes/onboarding+/company.tsx; addressValidator at apps/erp/app/modules/settings/settings.models.ts:95-107). Submitting this creates the company and everything a usable tenant needs.

Two more steps appear conditionally, and only in specific circumstances (apps/erp/app/routes/onboarding+/_layout.tsx:49-53):

Industry — shown only to internal Carbon staff accounts. It offers a demo-data template or a backup restore, so a seeded example company can be stood up. Regular sign-ups never see it.
Plan — shown only on Carbon Cloud, the hosted version at app.carbon.ms. It routes you to Stripe checkout to pick a plan before you enter the app. Self-hosted installs skip it entirely and go straight to /x.

NOTE

The company step does a lot of quiet work

Saving the company doesn't just insert one row. It also creates a "Headquarters" location from the address you entered (with your local timezone), links your user to the company as an employee, and seeds the tenant's baseline: chart of accounts, default posting accounts, numbering sequences, payment terms, and units of measure. This all happens under the hood via provisionOnboardingCompany and a background seed job (apps/erp/app/services/onboarding.server.ts; seed via seedCompany at apps/erp/app/modules/settings/settings.service.ts:751-765).

What you don't choose during onboarding

Fiscal year, accounting periods, and the numbering sequences are not asked for in the wizard. They come pre-seeded with sensible defaults, and you tune them afterward under Company settings. The wizard's job is to get you into a working tenant fast, not to make you configure the whole system up front.

The Implementation Hub

Once you're in the app, an empty tenant is still a long way from running production. The Implementation Hub (the "Get Started" area, at /x/get-started) is Carbon's structured onboarding checklist. It walks a new company through six phases from kickoff to go-live, with each phase deep-linking into the exact ERP screens you configure along the way (apps/erp/app/routes/x+/get-started+/_layout.tsx).

The Hub only exists for a company that has enrolled. Enrollment is self-serve: anyone who can update company settings can turn it on from the home-page card, no Carbon staff required (apps/erp/app/routes/x+/get-started+/enroll.tsx:24-48). While the Hub is active, it takes over the home page so the project stays front and center, and it emails your Admins that the Hub is ready (apps/erp/app/routes/x+/_index.tsx:37-53).

The six phases

The Hub is organized around six sequential gates — each phase ends at exactly one milestone you sign off before moving on (packages/onboarding/src/content/spine.ts:11-143):

Off-track

Configure

Set Carbon up around your business: sites, users, suppliers, parts, BOMs, and Bill of Process. Ends at "System configured" — this is the phase most of your setup work lives in.

The Configure and Acceptance phases nest concrete "do this in Carbon" actions inside them — import your BOM, run MRP into purchase orders and jobs, serialize and sell a part. Those nested steps auto-detect their own completion against real tenant data (Carbon checks whether you actually have items, a job, a sales order) rather than relying on a manual tick (packages/onboarding/src/content/spine.ts:38-131).

Tiers change what you see

The Hub adapts to how a company is being onboarded. There are three tiers — self_serve, guided, and enterprise — and self-serve enrollment defaults to self_serve (apps/erp/app/routes/x+/get-started+/enroll.tsx:41). The tier prunes the phases and pages that don't apply.

NOTE

Self-serve is the lean path

A self-serve company configures Carbon directly, so it skips the phases built for a Carbon-led project: Discovery (scoping), Migrate data, and Acceptance all fall away, along with their pages like Scope Summary, Roles, Requirements, and Data Migration. What's left is the core spine — Configure, Train, Go-Live — plus the pages every tier shares. The guided and enterprise tiers add the full commercial project structure back in (packages/onboarding/src/content/registry.ts:8-115).

The Setup Map

The single most useful page for a hands-on operator is the Setup Map (in the "Configure Carbon" group). It's the first-run configuration checklist: every master, reference, and config entity a new company sets up before it starts transacting, grouped by module and labelled as it appears in that module's navigation (packages/onboarding/src/content/setup.ts:32-436). It covers, per module:

FieldType

Fiscal year, accounting periods, chart of accounts, default accounts, cost centers, dimensions, payment terms, exchange rates, asset classes.

Company identity, document templates, logos, printing, sequences, custom fields, integrations, approval rules.

Locations, work centers, processes, training abilities, failure modes, maintenance schedules.

Employees, departments, shifts, holidays, attributes, employee types, permission groups.

Units, item groups, parts, materials, tools, consumables, and the material substances, shapes, grades, and finishes.

Customers, customer types and statuses, price lists, pricing rules, no-quote reasons.

Suppliers and supplier types.

Storage units, storage types, storage rules, shipping methods.

Scrap reasons.

Each row deep-links straight to the screen where you configure that thing (apps/erp/app/routes/x+/get-started+/_layout.tsx:59-118), and its "configured" state is tracked so the Plan page and the Setup Map can never disagree about the same work. Rows tagged to a module drop out when you exclude that module, so an org that doesn't run quality or accounting doesn't see setup it will never do. The Accounting group only appears at all when accounting is enabled for the company (apps/erp/app/routes/x+/get-started+/_layout.tsx:230-232).

Where to go next

The wizard gets you a tenant; the Hub gets you to production. For the settings the wizard seeds and you refine, see Company settings. For adding the rest of your team, their access, and permission groups, see People. And for the end-to-end story of how work actually flows through Carbon once you're set up, the guides walk it start to finish.