First login

A welcome screen offers a choice: explore a sample business, start from scratch, upload an existing Margini file, import from your POS or QuickBooks, or upload any spreadsheet. Not sure? “Explore the sample business” is the fastest way to see what the app can do before entering anything real — and it’s risk-free: if you already had real data entered, it’s tucked away while you look, not erased, see below.

Already clicked around?

If you explored the sample business, your own data (if you’d entered any) was safely parked, not erased. A “↵ Return to my data” button appears in place of the “↻ Change Starting Data” button under Dashboard's “What to Do Next” (Other things you can do), and in Manage Data, click it any time to bring your numbers back exactly as they were. Ready to keep the sample data instead, or start fresh? Any other choice from the ↻ chooser below asks you to confirm first whenever it would discard real work with one click, whether that’s your own entered data or data still parked from an earlier sample preview. Just opened the chooser to look and don’t want to pick anything? Close it with the × in its top-right corner, nothing changes until you actually choose.

What order to enter things in

Follow the Setup progress card above: Revenue, then Expenses, then Fixed costs, then Inventory, then Pricing. Each gold bar is a step you’ve completed; once all five are done, the card disappears on its own with a one-time “✓ Setup complete” message.

Business types, importing, and the modules you turn on as you need them — the parts of the guide that go beyond a quickstart. See Navigation for the always-on tabs, and Data & Security for backup and restore.

Business types

You picked one on the welcome screen (or it defaults to General). It changes what a few screens track, not the underlying math, and you can switch it later without losing data.

• General business. Retail, market stalls, food businesses. Sales Log, Pricing and Inventory work as described in Navigation.
• Rental properties. Adds a Rooms tab: each room tracks monthly rent and cost, and a tenancy history (move-in and move-out dates) rather than a single "occupied" flag, so past months stay accurate even after someone moves out. "Generate this month's rent" fills in rent rows for every currently-occupied room in one click. Room profit is labeled "before shared costs," it's direct cost only, not an allocation of the whole property's overhead.
• Services. For consulting, tutoring, and similar. If you genuinely have no cost of goods, check "No cost of goods" in Fixed Costs so the app states your margin instead of asking for a COGS figure it can't get from you.
• Home care. Adds a Clients tab, lighter than Rooms, no recurring rent, just who you're billing. Sales Log rows can be tagged to a client to see revenue per client.

Importing your numbers

All imports happen in your browser, files are read locally and never uploaded anywhere, and each one previews what it found before anything changes your data.

• From your POS. Clover, Square, Toast, Lightspeed, or Other. Upload the CSV export, check the preview, then choose Replace or Add to existing.
• From QuickBooks. A Profit & Loss Detail report (CSV) pulls rent, payroll, and other fixed costs.
• Any spreadsheet. You tell Margini which columns are which, works for sales, expenses, or products from a file that isn't from a listed POS or QuickBooks.
• A previous Margini backup. Restores everything, not just sales, see Data & Security.

Further modules you can turn on

Open ⚙ Settings (Manage group in the sidebar) → Modules to switch any of these on. All ship off until you turn them on; start with what's relevant to your business, not everything at once.

• Pricing. The right price per product from true cost, overhead, and target margin.
• Inventory. Track stock, spot slow movers, see what waste is costing you.
• Budget. Compare actual revenue and costs against your plan.
• Who Owes Me. Receivables: who owes you, how much, and what's overdue.
• Tax Set-Aside. How much to set aside for tax so it's never a surprise.
• Channels, Growth KPIs, Set-Asides. Performance by sales channel, growth metrics at a glance, and splitting incoming cash into tax/profit/emergency/owner buckets.

Multiple businesses

The business switcher at the top of the sidebar (your business name and a ▾) isn’t just a label — click it to see every business on this device, switch between them, or + Add Business to start a new one from scratch. Each business keeps its own sales, expenses, modules, and settings; switching never mixes one business’s numbers into another’s. A business created before you signed in (or on a device that was offline) shows “Connect to your account” in the switcher — tap it once to link that business to your Clarity account so it shows up wherever you sign in. Not connecting it yet doesn’t lose anything; the business stays fully usable on this device either way. “Archive this business” in the same menu tucks a business away without deleting it — find it again under “Show archived.”

Team members & roles

Under ⚙ Settings → Members, invite someone by email to help run the business with you — they need a Clarity account already (ask them to sign up first if an invite comes back “no account found”). Every invitation gets one of four roles, each opening up more than the last:

The person who created the business is its Owner — not an invitable role, and the only membership that can never be removed. Only Owner and Admin can invite or remove people; everyone else sees the member list read-only. Removing someone (“Remove” next to their name, or “Cancel” on a pending invite) revokes their access immediately; it doesn’t touch anything they already entered.

People & Payroll (Wages & Owner Pay)

Always on — who works for you (including yourself, as an Owner) and what labour costs, no tax withholding, benefits, or time clock, just wages recorded correctly and once. Add a person, log hours and rate each pay period, then click Mark paid: that's the one step that writes the Wages expense, you never re-type it in Expense Log or in Fixed Costs. The Wages & Owner Pay figure on the Fixed Costs tab is read-only for this reason — it's the total of everyone's pay, always kept in sync automatically, so it can never be entered twice.

Each person also gets a cost treatment: Overhead (supports the business generally), Direct labor (directly delivers what you sell), or Mixed (a percentage split you set, e.g. 60% direct / 40% overhead). This only changes how Pricing treats that person's pay when working out overhead — their full wage always counts in your financial results either way, so nothing about your actual Revenue, Net Profit, or Cash Flow changes based on this choice. If you had Wages or Owner Pay entered in Fixed Costs before this existed, Clarity offers a one-time move into People & Payroll that preserves your existing total exactly — nothing is deleted or reinterpreted, and declining just asks again next time rather than losing the figure.

Made a mistake in an entry? From Payroll History, Edit lets Owner, Admin, or Bookkeeper roles correct that entry's hours or rate inline — if it's already paid, its mirrored Wages expense updates automatically to match, so the two figures never drift apart. Delete removes the entry entirely and is restricted to Owner or Admin, a stricter check than Edit, since deleting is never the right way to fix a mistake — use Edit for that. If a deleted entry was already paid, its mirrored Wages expense is removed with it, so nothing is left behind pointing at an entry that no longer exists.

Discounts & complimentary services

Built into Sales Log, no separate module. Price the item on Pricing first, then in Sales Log or Enter Numbers select it and enter a Discount % — Final Price calculates live (Standard Price × (1 − Discount %) × Units). A complimentary sale is just Discount % = 100, not a separate "free" product: that keeps what was actually delivered accurate, for any business type. A discounted or comp sale shows a small tag ("15% OFF" or "COMP") in Sales Log so it's never mistaken for a mistake later.

Recurring Revenue (Services & Home Care)

For a client who pays you on a repeating schedule — a monthly retainer, a weekly session, an ongoing care plan. Set it up once from Clients → Recurring Revenue: choose the client, the amount, and whether it repeats weekly, every 2 weeks (biweekly), or monthly. Setting up a schedule doesn't record any revenue by itself, it's an expectation, not a transaction — Clarity tracks it in Who Owes Me automatically as each payment comes due. Click Mark Paid when the money actually arrives; that's the one step that writes the Sales Log entry, you never re-enter it by hand. If you already recorded that payment the normal way through Sales Log first, Mark Paid recognizes it and asks whether to use that existing entry instead of creating a second one — nothing is ever silently duplicated. Pausing or removing a schedule only stops future payments from being expected; anything already recorded stays exactly as it is.

A schedule can carry a standing discount %, for a client who always pays a reduced rate. It works the same way a Sales Log discount does — the amount you enter is the full rate, Clarity shows what actually gets billed after the discount, and the resulting Sales Log entry carries the discount just like a manual one, so it's counted correctly everywhere discounts are reported (Additional Insights, Discounts Given, Business Summary Report). Changing a schedule's discount only affects occurrences generated from that point on; anything already billed keeps the rate it was actually billed at.

The Recurring Revenue panel itself collapses once you have no active schedules (or stays expanded if you do), and always shows how many are active and overdue even while collapsed. A search box inside it filters by client name, description, amount, or frequency — useful once you have more than a handful of schedules.

Where your data lives

Signing in uses your email and a one-time link; that, plus basic account details (when you signed up, your business name and type), is stored with our identity provider so we can recognize you — that's identity data, not your business's numbers. If you use Multiple businesses or Team members (see Module Guides), the business names, who’s a member, and each person's role are stored with us too — that's what lets a business and its team show up correctly wherever a member signs in. Everything you actually enter about your business — sales, expenses, products, fixed costs, people, payroll — stays in your browser on this device. None of it is sent to or stored on a Margini server by default. Nobody at Margini Financial can see your day-to-day numbers unless you choose to share a Backup file or your screen with us directly.

Your day-to-day entries don't yet follow you between devices or browsers automatically — a sale logged on your laptop doesn't appear on your phone by itself. Until that catches up to Members and Multiple businesses, use ↓ Backup / Cloud backup and restore on the other device (see below) to bring your numbers along, or simply keep entering on the one device you use for this business.

Cloud backup is available: turn it on and your financial data is encrypted in your browser with a passphrase only you know before anything uploads — we store the encrypted result, not your numbers, and can't read it or recover it if that passphrase is lost. Off by default; everything above about local-only storage stays true unless you opt in.

Account access and recovery

Signing in is passwordless: whoever can click the link sent to your registered email is you, as far as the app is concerned. That's convenient, but it means losing access to that email address means losing access to your account — there's no password to reset instead.

• Before you lose access: if you know you're about to change email providers or close an old inbox, update your sign-in email first. Settings → Account → “Change sign-in email” sends a confirmation link to the new address (and possibly your current one too, some projects require both); nothing changes until you confirm, and your business data and session stay exactly as they are throughout.
• Add a recovery contact: Settings → Account → “Account Recovery Contact” is an optional email or phone number our support team can use to help verify it's really you if you ever need manual recovery. It's never used for anything automated — no texts, no emails sent to it — it's just there for a human to reach you if needed.
• If you've already lost access: email hello@marginifinancial.com from any address explaining what happened. We verify manually before making any change — be ready to describe your business name, roughly when you signed up, and something about your recent data (a recent sale, a product you've priced, anything only the real account holder would know). We will never ask for a government ID for this.

Backup and re-importing

• Your work auto-saves to this browser as you go, no save button needed.
• ↓ Backup downloads a full Excel copy, one tab per section, including currency, target margin, and which modules you've switched on, not just your figures.
• Save that file into a cloud-synced folder (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox) so a lost or wiped computer doesn't mean lost data. On Chrome or Edge, Manage Data → “Your data is yours” can automate this to a folder you choose.
• Restore on another device: open ClarityApp there, choose “Upload an existing Margini file,” then pick Replace or Add to existing.
• On a shared or public computer, use “Clear data from this device” in Manage Data when done, ideally after backing up first.
• If it's been about a week since your last backup and you've changed things, the app reminds you with a one-click “Back up now.” Dismissible, it won't badger you.

Printing a snapshot

Go to Dashboard (built for this, not Additional Insights' charts), open Help & Guide, and use the print button below. Choose “Save as PDF” in your browser's print dialog for a file instead of paper.

Sharing a report externally

Manage Data → “Export Business Summary” builds a one-page Business Summary Report: Financial Health, Revenue, Net Profit, Cash Position, a 13-week Cash Flow snapshot, Receivables, your largest expense categories, top revenue sources, and a short CFO Read summary, formatted for printing or saving as a PDF. Meant for sharing with a lender, landlord, business partner, or advisor who needs the picture without your full day-to-day detail. It reuses the exact same figures Dashboard and Additional Insights already show you, nothing is calculated differently for the report, and it respects the same “not enough data yet” limits those screens do rather than guessing.