Introduction

Welcome to Foundations. This guide will walk you through the essential steps to get up and running — from creating an account to scheduling your first session.

1. Create a Foundations Account

You can sign up for a Foundations account from the top of our homepage by clicking either of the Sign Up buttons.

You will be directed to a form where you can enter your name, email address, and password. We ask for your first and last names because we use them in emails and invoices sent to your clients.

You will then receive a code via email to verify your email address. Enter the code in the form to complete the signup process.

That's it in terms of creating your account. Next, you will be directed to your Foundations dashboard. A welcome message will be displayed prompting you to set up payments. This is important, as you will not be able to issue invoices until you have set up payments.

2. Setting Up Payments

This will take you to a Stripe-hosted page (it might take a brief moment to load), where you will provide basic personal information including your bank details so you can receive payouts from payments made by your clients. The whole process takes less than 5 minutes. We recommend you complete this process in one go.

You may be asked to provide a photo of a government-issued ID. Please note that Stripe handles identity checks and bank-account verification for you. We never see your sensitive information.

In one of the steps, you tell Stripe when you would like payments to be paid out to your bank account. We suggest you set this to Automatic, so that you don't need to manage this manually.

Once you complete the process, you will be redirected back to the Settings page within Foundations. Another message will be displayed confirming that you have set up payments and prompting you to complete the last step of the onboarding process: adding your first client.

3. Adding Your First Client

You can simply use the Add Client button in the Onboarding Checklist. Otherwise, navigate to the Clients page via the left-hand sidebar. Since you don't have any clients yet, it will look something like this.

Click any of the visible Add Client buttons, either in the top-right or center of the page. This will open a form where you can input basic client information. First name, last name, and email are required.

And that’s it! You’ve added your first client and are ready to schedule sessions with them, issue invoices, and more.

4. Schedule a Session and Issue an Invoice

Start by clicking the three-dots for your new client in the Actions column of the clients table, then click Schedule session in the dropdown menu.

After you click Schedule, you'll see the success page showing a summary of the session you just scheduled, along with the suggested next step of issuing an invoice for it.

If you click the Issue Invoice button, you'll be taken to the invoice email builder. You can input the amount to charge for the session, as well as an additional message for your client.

Once you're happy, click Send to… to send the invoice. You'll then see a confirmation that the invoice was sent successfully.

In the meantime, your client will have received two emails:

And that's it! You've successfully set up your account, added a client, scheduled a session, and issued an invoice.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at support@usefoundations.app