Getting started

Your first ten minutes. Sign up, confirm your email address, then go straight to Settings. On the Business tab, fill in your business name and default hourly rate under Your business, and upload your logo under Your logo. Then open the Email tab and fill in Sending email, so everything vaOS sends carries your name and address rather than ours. Nothing that should come from you sends until that is done, and the Setting up: sending email section below walks you through it.

Then add your first client. vaOS creates their private portal link the moment you save them; send it over, with the getting-started email if you like, and they are in with nothing to install and no password to invent. From then on their requests arrive in vaOS, you log time as you work, and the rest of this guide is about everything that happens around that.

How it all fits together

The shape of vaOS is one journey. Somebody says hello, through your website form, through your warm outreach, or in person. They become a lead, and vaOS sends the booking invite and chases it politely if they go quiet. When they book, vaOS spots the call in your Google Calendar, shows you when it is, and lets you join from the dashboard. After the call, one click turns the lead into a client with a portal on your brand.

From there the client raises requests, you or your associates do the work, every minute is logged at the right rate, prepaid blocks count themselves down, urgent work charges its premium, and the reports tell you who pays on time and what you actually made. Each section below is one stop on that journey.

Dashboard

Your day, decided for you. The top of the dashboard is the deck. Right now shows the time and, once you have put your town under Your business in Settings, the weather. The scribble pad is one box for the back-of-an-envelope things, like the phone number somebody just read out, and it saves as you type. Today holds every to-do due today or overdue, ready to tick off where it sits, plus any request scheduled for today. Waiting on you collects what has arrived and needs you: new requests and client replies, associate time waiting for your approval, calls a lead has booked that you have not opened yet, cancelled calls, website enquiries that have had nothing sent to them, overdue invoices, overdue bills from your associates, any emails that failed to send, and a nudge if your mail settings or your default hourly rate are still missing. The deck refreshes itself every minute, so there is no need to reload.

Below the deck, your upcoming calls for the next thirty days sit beside any urgent requests. Each call has a join button when its invite carries a video link, and leaves the list an hour after it starts. Then come the cards that only appear when something needs doing: prepaid hours running out, prepaid hours about to expire, invoices overdue, requests waiting on a client for over a week, clients not welcomed yet, time not invoiced yet, your ICO or insurance renewal inside thirty days, and clients with no contract on file. Not welcomed yet and No contract on file carry a cross on each row, which clears that reminder and nothing else.

If a card is showing, it wants something; if the dashboard is calm, so are you. Start here each morning and let it do the nagging so nothing lives in your head.

Clients

One page per client holding everything about them, in tabs: Details, Requests, Time, Invoices, Contracts if you use them, Notes, and From the client. Details carries their contact information, sector and rates, and the Where things stand card gives you the money picture at a glance: what is prepaid, what is billable, what has been invoiced and what is outstanding. Notes are yours alone, for anything worth remembering about them, and the client never sees them. From the client holds what they have told you about their business and the documents they have uploaded through their portal.

Rates work on a simple rule: blank means your business default from Settings, a figure means theirs. The same rule runs urgent pricing, where a client can carry their own urgent uplift or a fixed urgent hourly rate, and a zero uplift switches urgent pricing off for them alone.

Adding a client creates their portal link at the same time. Send it from their page, with the getting-started email if you have it switched on, and they are in. The Clients list searches by name, business or email, filters by sector, and gives each row a menu of quick actions such as logging time.

One email address belongs to one person. vaOS will not let the same address sit on a client, a lead and an outreach prospect at once: as you type, it flags an address that is already in use and names who has it, and the save refuses until it is sorted, usually by converting the existing person rather than adding them twice. Associates keep a list of their own, so an associate can also be one of your clients.

Clients you no longer work with can be archived from the row menu, which takes them out of your everyday lists with their history kept, and Restore brings them back. If a client asks for a copy of what you hold, the Their data card on their page downloads everything about them as a zip. If they ask to be forgotten, archive them first, then choose Erase permanently from their row menu on the Archived tab. You are shown exactly what will go, offered the download one last time, and asked whether to keep the invoice figures so your reports still add up, or remove everything. Erasing cannot be undone.

The client portal

What your clients see and click, and it never says vaOS anywhere.

Getting them in is one button: on their page in Clients, press Copy portal link and paste it into an email, or let the getting-started email carry it for you. The link is theirs alone, needs no account and no password, and keeps working until you revoke it from the same page.

When your client opens it they see your logo, your business name, your accent colour, and their requests grouped under plain headings by where things stand. To ask for something they press the new request bar and fill in two boxes, What do you need for the short summary and Any detail for links, deadlines and files, tick Mark as urgent if it truly is, at which point your urgent terms appear right there with their own rate in them, attach anything useful, and press Send request. It lands in your Requests list the same second.

Each request opens into its thread. They read your replies, add their own in the Add a reply box, attach files, and watch the status change without asking, because the four statuses are written from their side. Two more tabs appear when there is something behind them. Time shows while they have an open prepaid block you have not hidden from them: Where the time went, with the prepaid bar counting down and what recent time was spent on. Invoices lists the invoices you have recorded for them, with the PDF to download when you attached one; a client who deals with invoices elsewhere can switch that tab off from their own settings.

They can also close a request themselves, from the three dots on it, choosing either that it was opened in error or that it is no longer needed. Nothing is deleted: the thread, the files and any time logged stay exactly as they were, and you can still see all of it. The request is marked complete with their reason on it, it arrives unread in your bell, and their reply box on that thread goes, so anything further from them comes as a new request rather than reopening a job they finished with.

Two boxes on the Your business tab let them brief you properly. About your business is theirs to fill with how they work, tone of voice, suppliers, busy periods, anything you should know, and it saves straight to their page in your vaOS. Documents and SOPs lets them upload the how-we-do-things files with a title on each, so their refund policy lives where you will look for it rather than in an email from months ago.

They also control their own notification emails from the portal, a reply and a status change each with its own switch, so if a client wants fewer messages, that is their toggle to flip, not your job to remember. The portal has its own lightbulb too, for suggesting features, and it never mentions vaOS either. And two quiet touches from your Settings frame the page: the banner, if you have one switched on, across the top, and your credentials line, ICO registration and insurer, in the footer if you have ticked the box on the Your credentials card.

Contracts and files

Two kinds of paperwork, both kept where they belong. A contract lives on the client: upload it to their page and the dashboard stops asking; until then, a card quietly nags that one is missing, and you can dismiss the nag for a client who genuinely does not need one. If you do not use contracts at all, untick Track a contract per client under Your business in Settings: the tab, the reminders and the dashboard list all go, and anything already uploaded is kept.

Files travel with the work. Clients attach them to requests in the portal, you attach them to replies, and everything stays in the thread it belongs to rather than an inbox. Storage comes with your plan, 250 MB on Free, 5 GB on Starter and 20 GB on Pro, and screenshots and documents rarely trouble those numbers.

Leads (Pro)

A Pro feature, along with Outreach and Associates. Everyone who might become a client, however they arrived. Website enquiries land here on their own, converted outreach prospects arrive with the booking invite already sent, and anyone else can be added by hand. An arrival needs nothing from you, because the invite and the reminder send themselves. A booking does: when the calendar sweep finds a call, the lead is marked unread, the bell says so and the number beside Leads in the sidebar counts it, so you can open their sheet and read what they wrote before the call. Opening the lead clears it, and a lead who cancels and books again is marked unread all over again.

The statuses say where each one stands. New means nothing has gone yet. Invited means the booking invite has been sent, and Reminded means the one automatic nudge has followed it. Call booked means vaOS found the call in your Google Calendar, or you marked it yourself, and the leads list shows the date and time under the pill. Meeting cancelled means a booked call disappeared from your diary. vaOS never chases a cancellation, because cancelling is an answer, so what happens next is your call. Rescheduled means a cancelled lead has booked again. Replied is for somebody who got in touch another way, Converted means they are now a client, and Not interested files them away without deleting them. Any status change you make stops the automatic emails.

Everything is set up on the Leads tab in Settings, whose first card checks the three things the chase needs: your mail settings, your booking link, and Google Calendar. The booking link is the whole point of the invite. A Google appointment schedule, Calendly, TidyCal or whatever you already use will do, as long as bookings land on your connected calendar with the lead as a guest. Automatic emails decides what happens when a website enquiry arrives: nothing, the booking invite alone, or the invite plus one reminder. The reminder waits two working days unless you change it, only sends between 8am and 6pm UK time, and goes as a reply to the invite. There is only ever one. A lead you add by hand is never emailed on its own: press Send booking invite on the lead to start it, and the reminder then follows the same rule. The same card also lets you choose to be emailed whenever a new lead arrives from your website.

The Your website form card holds your private capture address. Capture stays off until you press Switch capture on. Paste the address wherever your form plugin asks for a webhook, and treat it like a password: Get a new address retires the old one everywhere it was pasted. On WordPress, Contact Form 7 with the free CF7 to Webhook plugin is the supported route, and the card also has instructions for custom-built sites and a ready-made plain form. The Last 10 received card shows exactly what arrived, which is the first place to look if a form seems not to be getting through.

After the call, press Convert to client and they become a client with their details carried across, their getting-started email following your settings for it.

Outreach (Pro)

A Pro feature, switched on with Use email outreach on the Outreach tab in Settings. Warm introductions at a sustainable pace, not cold email. Add a prospect with their name, business, email and sector. Known as fills itself from the first word of the name, and is the name the emails use. Then press Write the first email on their row or their page. The email opens as it will be sent, with a box where the personal paragraph goes, a line written just for them, and it goes out under your own name and address.

If nothing comes back after your chosen gap, three working days unless you change it, anywhere from one to fourteen, vaOS sends your follow-up as a reply to the first email, in office hours only. A prospect who stays quiet is then marked Complete, five days after the follow-up unless you choose another gap or the moment it sends. Complete means filed, not deleted, and never emailed again, yet still one click from becoming a lead if a late reply lands. Both emails carry a one-click stop link that cannot be removed, and a prospect who uses it, or whom you mark Not interested, is stopped for good. Automatic sends are capped at twenty-five per pass to protect your sender reputation, and anything over waits for the next.

If you tick the hold for first emails sent outside working hours, a first email sent in the evening or at the weekend waits until after 8am on the next working day, and you can still edit it until it goes. Unticked, a click always sends there and then.

The list shows where each prospect stands: Not contacted, 1st email sent, Follow-up sent, Complete, Converted to lead, or Not interested, with a search box and a sector filter. When somebody replies wanting to talk, press They replied: make them a lead. They become a lead and the booking invite is emailed in that same click, which is where the Leads section above picks up the story.

Requests

Where the work lives. Clients raise requests through their portal, or you create them yourself for anything that arrived by phone or email, in which case it lands in their portal unread and they are emailed as usual. Each one is a single thread holding the conversation, the files, the status changes and the time logged against it. The answer to where is that up to is always the page itself, for both of you.

The four statuses are the whole system: Open, Waiting on client, Scheduled, Complete. Your client sees the same four phrased from their side. Scheduled carries the date you will do it, which puts the request on your dashboard's Today card that day and marks it late if the date passes. Assign a request to an associate and it becomes theirs to work; mark it urgent, or let the client mark it, and it wears the red pill, sorts to the top and, if you have urgent pricing set, charges accordingly.

A client can also close their own request from their portal, saying it was opened in error or that it is no longer needed. It comes back marked complete with a Closed by client pill and their reason, unread in your bell, with everything on it kept.

The Time section on every request shows what has been logged, lets you log your own time without leaving the page, and is where associate time arrives for your approval.

Urgent work

Urgent means two things in vaOS: attention and, if you want it, money. The attention part is automatic, the red pill, the top of every list, the dashboard card and the bell.

The money part is yours to configure in Settings. Set an urgent uplift, 50 means time and a half, and time logged on urgent requests is charged at each client's own rate plus that percentage, worked out per client so everybody pays their own premium. A client can override it on their record with their own uplift or a fixed urgent hourly figure, one or the other, and a zero switches urgent pricing off for them. The request shows the exact urgent rate that applies before you log a minute, and urgent entries wear a red tag in the time table so you can always see why a row cost more.

If you tick always bill urgent work separately, urgent time arrives with Keep off prepaid pre-ticked so it bills at the urgent rate rather than eating prepaid hours, and you can still untick it for a goodwill case. The premium lands in your margin, and the reports show it.

Associates (Pro)

A Pro feature. How you grow without your clients noticing. Add an associate, agree their hourly rate, and assign requests to them in one click; they are emailed and work in their own portal, invisible to your clients, marking work as working on it or handing it back. Getting them in works like clients: a private emailed link, no account and no password, resendable from their page if it goes astray.

They log time at their rate against the request. You approve each entry, adjusting the minutes if you need to, and the client is charged at your rate, the urgent rate when the request is urgent. The associate is paid what they logged; the difference is your margin, and the Margin by request report shows it without a spreadsheet. Monthly statements land in their portal, and there is no per-seat charge.

To-do

Your own task list, separate from client requests. Type what needs doing, add a date if it has one, and set a repeat for the things that come around again: daily, weekdays, weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Ticking a repeating to-do done brings the next one straight back, dated on from its due date, and unticking it takes the new one away again. The list sorts itself into Overdue, Today, This week, Later and Whenever, and anything due today or late also shows on your dashboard and in the bell.

To group tasks, type a #tag in the title, such as #admin or a client's name, and it is lifted out into a tag. The # button offers the tags you already use, so client and clients stay one tag rather than becoming two. Tags are the way to tie a task to a client or a project, because to-dos do not link to client records.

Calendar

Your Google Calendar, inside vaOS. Connect it once in Settings and the calendars you chose appear here a month at a time, showing the days you work, with everything colour coded: meetings in green, booked-in requests a deeper green, to-dos amber, invoices due blue, prepaid blocks running low violet and renewals grey, with a key at the top for the kinds on show that month. Today is badged and washed green, days already past step back, and the arrows or the arrow keys walk the months.

Click any day to open it: everything on it in full, each linking through to the request, to-do, invoice or client it belongs to, a Join link for a call with a Meet, and Edit and Delete on your own events. Add an event from there, with a Google Meet link if you tick the box, and it goes straight into Google. Nothing is copied, so there is never a second diary to keep in step. On a phone the grid becomes a list of the days with something on.

In the background, the same connection puts your upcoming calls on the dashboard with join buttons, and it is how vaOS notices when a lead books a call without anyone telling it. The connection uses the narrowest permissions Google allows, your events and your calendar list, nothing else, and you can disconnect it in Settings at any time.

Time tracker

Every minute, accounted for. The top of the page is the timer: choose the client, say what you are doing, and start it. Start it without choosing a client and nothing is lost: when you stop, the time waits under Waiting for a client until you say whose it was, or discard it. Log time after the fact the same way; durations read naturally, and 1h30, 45m, 0.75 and similar all work. Each entry carries a rate, the client's own unless you type a different figure for that one entry. When a client has more than one open prepaid block, a Take it from box lets you choose which block pays.

Time draws down the client's prepaid block when they have one; tick Keep off prepaid when something should bill separately instead. You can also log time straight on a request, which keeps the entry tagged to the work it belongs to, and on urgent requests the urgent rate applies itself at the moment you press log.

The bottom of the page is To be invoiced: everything outside a prepaid block that is not yet on an invoice, grouped by client, with each entry editable. That is where invoicing happens, and the Invoices and getting paid section below walks through it. Clear all deletes every uninvoiced entry for that client for good, so keep it for time logged in error.

Prepaid hours

Sell a block of hours and let vaOS do the arithmetic. Each block has its hours, its rate and, if you want one, an expiry date. Time logged for that client draws the block down automatically, your client can watch the bar move in their portal if you show it, and the dashboard flags blocks that are running low or about to expire before either becomes a conversation.

Work beyond the block does not vanish: overspill is priced at the client's rate and joins the billable list, so the handover from prepaid to payable is automatic. Each block can be closed once it is finished, reopened if you closed it too soon, and hidden from the client with Hide from client, which takes it out of their portal without changing the arithmetic.

The Prepaid hours and Prepaid movement reports show where every block stands and how hours have flowed.

Expenses

What the business costs to run, which is not the same as bookkeeping. Add each regular cost once, the software, the insurance, the phone, with who it is paid to, the amount, how often it goes out, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, a category, and when it next renews. vaOS turns them all into one monthly figure, spreading a yearly bill evenly across the year rather than as a spike, and totals each category.

A Renewing soon notice picks out anything close enough to still cancel, and the monthly figure is the money going out in the In and out report. There are no receipts or payment dates to reconcile, because those belong in your accounting tool.

Invoices and getting paid

vaOS deliberately does not generate invoices; you raise them in your own accounting tool, where they belong. What vaOS does is tell you exactly what to put on them, and remember everything afterwards.

When it is time to bill, open the Time tracker and look at To be invoiced. Tick the entries you are invoicing and the amount fills itself in from them, which you can change if your invoice says otherwise. Add the invoice number, the issued and due dates and, if you like, the PDF, then press Mark invoiced. Those entries leave the list, the invoice is recorded against the client, and the PDF appears in their portal. For an invoice that is not for logged time, use Add an invoice on the client's Invoices tab.

When the money arrives, press Mark paid on the client's Invoices tab. Until then vaOS tracks what is outstanding, raises overdue invoices on the dashboard and in the bell, and feeds the Who pays on time report, which names your promptest and slowest payers. The Not invoiced yet report shows your unbilled time by client, and how long the oldest of it has been waiting.

Sticky notes

The scraps of paper, digitised. A board of notes, edited where they sit, with the first line as the title, the way it is on paper. Each note takes the room it needs: a line or two stays small, a paragraph spreads to two columns, a long note to three, and the rest slot in around it. Add a note and a blank one appears at the front ready to type on; leave it blank and it simply goes again. Pick a colour, drag a note by its grip to move it, pin the ones that matter to the front, and delete a note when it has done its job.

Give a note a tag in its Tag it box and the tag bar above the board filters to it, while the search box matches anything written on a note. From anywhere in vaOS, typing #tag into supersearch opens the board already filtered to that tag.

Favourites

Your shortcuts to the rest of the internet. The handful of websites a working day keeps returning to, a client's WordPress admin, their email marketing dashboard, your bank, each saved with a label and its address. They open in a new tab, so you can go somewhere else without losing your place in vaOS.

Reports

How the business is really doing, drawn entirely from what you have already logged, so there is nothing extra to fill in. The full set: By client, What an hour earned, In and out, Not invoiced yet, Invoices, Who pays on time, Requests, Prepaid hours, Prepaid movement, New clients, Where leads come from, and Quiet clients, plus Outreach results when your plan includes outreach, and Associates and Margin by request when you use associates.

Pick the range at the top: this month, last month, the last three months, this or last tax year, everything, or dates of your own. Most reports open with a chart drawn from the same rows as the table beneath it, and the summary figures compare the range with the one before. Columns can be sorted, and the Columns button hides the ones you do not care about, remembered for each report. Download this report gives you the table as a CSV, without any columns you have hidden.

If you would normally ask a bookkeeper, look here first.

Training

Short videos, inside the app. The Training section holds screen recordings walking through vaOS one job at a time, watched right there without leaving the page. Use them when seeing it is quicker than reading it, and use this guide when you need to look something up.

Your email wording

Every email vaOS sends under your name can be reworded to sound like you. Open Settings and go to the Email tab. Below Sending email and Welcoming a new client there is one folded card per email: portal links, replies and status changes to clients, and, while you use those features, the lead invites and reminder, the outreach emails, and the associate emails.

Open a card, change the subject or the message, and press Save wording at the bottom, which saves every card at once, folded or not. Words in curly braces, such as {business_name} or {portal_url}, are swapped for the real thing when the email sends, and each card lists the ones it understands. Anything you leave as it is, or blank, keeps the standard wording, including any improvements we make to it later.

Setting up: sending email

Ten minutes, and nothing sends to your clients without it, so do this first. Open Settings, go to the Email tab, and find the Sending email card. Everything vaOS sends on your behalf, portal links, welcome emails, lead invites, outreach, associate links, goes out from your own address or not at all: there is deliberately no falling back to a vaOS address for mail that should come from you. Until this card is filled in, the buttons that send as you, invites, outreach, associate links, refuse politely and say why, and nothing goes out pretending to be you.

You need five things from your email provider: the SMTP host, the port, 587 for most providers or 465 for direct SSL, your username, usually your full email address, your password, and the from address, usually the same as the username. On a Google account the password box must be an app password, not your normal one: Google blocks normal passwords for this, so create one at myaccount.google.com under Security, App passwords, and paste it in.

Then use the card's own proof: put your address in Send a test to and press Save and send a test. If the test lands, you are done for good. If it does not, the two usual culprits are a normal password where an app password is needed, and 465 where 587 should be, in that order.

A message that does not go out later on is not lost. Anything that hits a problem appears under Mail that did not send, at the bottom of the same Email tab, with who it was to, what it was, and, behind Detail, the reason the server gave, when it last failed, whether that attempt was automatic or one of yours, and when the next one is due. Failures try again on their own every fifteen minutes for a maximum for 4 tries, so a password you have just put right usually sorts itself out within the quarter hour. The envelope on a row sends that one immediately rather than waiting, and a hand send that fails does not use up the automatic tries. The bin deletes one you would rather never went. Two boxes above the list hide the failed or the sent, and a message that failed and then went out stays on the list showing the time it left, so you can see it arrived rather than wondering. A banner at the top of Settings and the Waiting on you card on your dashboard both tell you when there is something here worth looking at.

Setting up: Google Calendar

Two minutes, one button, and vaOS gains eyes on your diary. Open Settings, go to the Calendar tab, and press Connect Google Calendar. Google asks you to pick your account and approve two narrow permissions, seeing your events and your list of calendars, which is deliberately all vaOS ever asks for. If Google shows a tick box beside each permission, tick both.

Back in vaOS the card changes: tick the calendars vaOS should watch and show, and save. Tick more than one and a New events go in box appears, offering only the calendars you ticked, so you can choose where events made in vaOS are written. From then on your meetings appear in the app, your upcoming calls carry join buttons on the dashboard, and, the quiet payoff, when a lead books a call vaOS spots it in the diary and marks the lead booked on its own.

Nothing is copied and there is no second calendar to maintain: anything added in vaOS goes straight into Google. Disconnect any time from the same card, and everything simply goes back to manual.

Setting up: your portal address (Pro)

Pro only, and the one setup that touches DNS, so here it is click by click. Open Settings, go to the Plan tab, find Your own portal address, and type the address you want your clients to see, portal.yourbusiness.co.uk is the usual shape. Your website is not affected and does not move: only that one new name points at us.

The card then shows a small table, Type, Name, Value and TTL. Add exactly that record wherever your domain's DNS is looked after, usually your registrar or your web host's control panel. Do not change your nameservers and leave everything already in there alone. Once the record is in, press I have added the record.

The card switches to With us, and that genuinely means there is nothing else for you to do: we finish the setup at our end and switch you over, usually within a working day, and the card shows Live when it is done. Every link sent from then on uses your address, every older link your clients already have keeps working, and if you ever picked the wrong domain, Disconnect puts everything safely back and you start again with the right one.

Settings

Settings is split into tabs, and below is every card on each. The rule underneath all of it: settings are defaults, not handcuffs. A client's own rate beats the default rate, their own uplift beats the business uplift, and a tick on the day beats the billing default.

The Business tab:

The Sectors and Plan tabs:

The Email tab:

The Calendar and Leads tabs:

The Outreach and Account tabs:

Documents

A place for the writing that belongs to the business rather than to a client: a 30-day marketing plan, a set of email templates, the wording for a service, the steps for a job you do every month, newsletter drafts, onboarding notes. Not a word processor, just somewhere to keep working documents inside vaOS so they are never in a file you have to go looking for.

The Documents page lists your folders first, then anything not in a folder, with when each was created and last edited, and you can search by title and sort by last edited, name or date created. Folders can sit inside folders, up to five deep; make one from the New folder link, open it from the list, and rename, move or delete it from its three-dot menu. Deleting a folder never deletes what is in it: its documents and subfolders move up a level.

Opening a document shows it as a page to read. Press Edit to write: the editor has headings, bold, italic, underline, bullet and numbered lists, links, quotes, tables and undo, and it saves by itself a moment after you stop typing, with Saving and Saved shown at the top. A pasted table stays a table, and while your cursor is in one a row of buttons appears for adding and removing rows and columns. Done takes you back to the reading view. A new document is only kept once something is written on it, so backing out of a blank one leaves nothing behind.

From the three-dot menu on a document or on its page you can rename, duplicate, move it between folders, download it as a PDF named after its title, print it, or delete it.