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1. Set Up Your Firm

Goal: create your trial account, complete the onboarding wizard as Meridian Tax Advisors, and land on your dashboard with a teammate invited.

Time: ~5 minutes

Steps

  1. Sign up for a free trial. The trial lasts 15 days and asks for no credit card. Create your account and confirm your email if prompted. Your first sign-in opens the onboarding wizard.

  2. Wizard step 1 — Welcome to FileOnion. In Enter Organization, type Meridian Tax Advisors (letters, numbers, and spaces only). Under Choose your plan, select Professional — this tutorial uses workflow features that Professional includes. Enterprise is shown for awareness but is marked Sales only; it is provisioned through a sales conversation, not self-serve signup. Click Next. You can change plans later in Settings.

  3. Wizard step 2 — Customize Your Brand. Pick a Primary Brand Color and Secondary Brand Color with the color swatches or by typing hex codes (for example #742DDB). These colors appear on buttons, links, and the emails your clients receive. Click Next, or Skip to keep the defaults.

  4. Wizard step 3 — Your Default Workflow. Review the default 5-stage kanban workflow that every request moves through:

    # Stage Default status
    1 New Sent
    2 Client Open Read
    3 Files Uploaded Partial
    4 Needs Review NeedsReview
    5 Approved Approved

    On Professional you can customize up to 5 stages and 10 workflow actions later in Settings → Workflow. Click Next.

  5. Wizard step 4 — Invite Your First Teammate. Enter a teammate's email and pick a role:

    • Member — upload, comment, create requests
    • Admin — full management except billing

    Click Send invite. If you're working alone today, click Skip — you can invite people later from Settings → Teams. (On the Personal plan the wizard skips this step.)

  6. Wizard step 5 — You're Ready to Go. A banner shows how many trial days remain; you can upgrade anytime from Settings → Billing. Turn on all three Email notifications — File Upload, Request Viewed, and New Comment — so you see activity land in your inbox during parts 4 and 5. Then click Go to my workspace.

Checkpoint

You are on the dashboard. It greets you with "Welcome back", and shows stat cards for Drafts and your workflow stages, an activity feed, a Request Tracker, and a Recent Clients list (all empty for now). The sidebar lists Dashboard, Requests, Kanban Board, Clients, Templates, File Manager, Organization, Workflows, and Support.

Next: 2. Create a Request with AI