Getting started with Skyline Nexus ERP

Your first week with Skyline Nexus ERP

Getting started with Skyline Nexus ERP is the short list of checks and settings that turn a freshly signed-up account into a business ready to trade for real. It matters because sign-up already does the heavy accounting work for you automatically, so the first week is about confirming those defaults suit your business, not building the system from an empty screen.

This checklist runs in the order most owners actually work through it: what sign-up already provisioned, business settings, your branch and invoice layouts, users and roles, payment accounts, opening balances, and a first sale to prove it all connects. Each step links to a deeper guide where one exists, so use this article as the map and the others as the detail.

What sign-up already built for you

Signing up for the free first month, with no card required, already created your business, a branch, and, once you verified your e-mail, activated the plan you chose with all its modules. Behind the scenes it also provisioned the ledger: a chart of accounts template picked from your currency, the current fiscal year with monthly periods, default general ledger accounts for cash, bank, receivables, payables, sales, cost of goods sold, inventory, VAT input and output and salaries, and automatic posting already switched on for sales, purchases, payments, expenses, payroll and depreciation.

Sign-up also created a Cash payment account and a Bank payment account, linked to the ledger and set as your branch's defaults, set your market's date format, clock and currency-symbol position, and gave every branch two invoice layouts, a Standard tax invoice and a Simplified receipt-style layout, pre-filled with your business name, address and logo. None of the steps below are building these from zero; they are confirming and extending what is already there.

The template behind your chart of accounts depends on your currency: a Saudi riyal business gets VAT and GOSI accounts, a UAE dirham business gets VAT accounts, and every other currency, including the euro and the Canadian dollar, gets a general template with sales-tax accounts added so VAT or GST has somewhere to post. Sign-up also expects you to set up two-factor sign-in the first time you log in, which is worth doing before you invite anyone else into the account.

Step one: confirm your business settings

Open Settings, Business Settings. The Business tab, shown first, holds Financial year start month, Stock Accounting Method and Transaction Edit Days, the number of days a transaction stays editable after its date; check these match how your business actually reports and works. The Tax tab holds your tax registration numbers and default tax rates, covered in full in our guide on taxes and VAT rates setup.

The remaining tabs run Exchange Rate Center, System, Dashboard, Modules, Product, Purchases, Sale, POS Sale, Display Screen, Payment, Reward Point Settings, Contact, Prefixes, Custom Labels, Email Settings, SMS Settings and Download Skyline App, in that order down the left of the settings screen. You do not need to visit every tab in week one; Product, Purchases and Sale matter most if you plan to sell physical stock straight away.

The Modules tab is worth a look even so: it lists every module included in your subscription, tells you where to go if you need one more, and is the fastest way to confirm the plan you signed up for matches what everyone in the business can actually see in the menu.

Step two: check your branch and invoice layouts

Sign-up created one business location for you. If you trade from more than one site, add the others under Settings, Business Locations, Add: the form lets each new branch create its own Standard and Simplified invoice layouts or use the existing ones, and asks which one it Prints by default, the Standard invoice for business customers or the Simplified invoice for walk-in ones.

Open your existing layouts under Settings, Invoice Settings and check the pre-filled address, phone, e-mail and logo are correct, since these print on every invoice from day one. Deeper edits, such as the address and bank-details lines or the invoice numbering scheme, belong in our guide on invoice layouts and invoice numbering.

Remember which layout prints where: the type you chose at sign-up, or on the new-branch form, is what the POS screen prints by default, while the Sales screen always prints the Standard layout. If your business serves both walk-in customers and account customers who need a full tax invoice, check that both screens are pointing at the layout you actually want each of them to use.

Step three: add your users and their roles

Nobody should share the owner's login once a second person joins the business. Under User Management, Users, Add user creates a login for each person; under User Management, Roles, Add Role builds the permission set they get, from a cashier who only needs the POS screen to a bookkeeper who needs Fiscal Authority.

Decide roles before you invite people, not after: it is far easier to design who can approve a large journal entry or issue a credit note while the business is still small than to unpick shared logins later. Our guide on roles, permissions and segregation of duties works through the design in depth.

A useful rule for week one: give the fewest permissions a person needs to do their job, then widen a role once you see what it is actually missing, rather than starting everyone on a broad role and trying to narrow it down after mistakes have already happened.

Step four: check your payment accounts

Cash and Bank already exist and are already your branch's default accounts for their respective payment methods, linked to the general ledger accounts behind them. Add any further account, a second bank account or a card settlement account, for example, under Payment Accounts, List Accounts, and set it as the default for the branches and payment methods that actually use it.

A payment account with no link to the ledger is a common early mistake: every account you add here should point at a real general ledger account under Fiscal Authority, so that money received or paid lands correctly on the balance sheet. Our guide on payment accounts and treasury covers the setup in more depth.

If your business takes card payments through a separate processor, add that settlement account now rather than routing everything through Bank: it keeps card takings visible on their own line until they actually clear into your bank account, which makes reconciling the two much easier at month end.

Step five: enter your opening balances

If you are moving from another system or from spreadsheets, your first task inside Fiscal Authority is entering the trial balance you are carrying forward, under Opening Balances, and your customer and supplier balances against their own contact records rather than as a single lump sum. Both sets must reconcile to your old books before you save them.

This is the point where your work in setting up Fiscal Authority pays off: if the chart of accounts, account types and default accounts are right, your opening balances will slot straight in and the trial balance will foot to zero on the first try. Our guides on setting up Fiscal Authority and on migrating to Skyline Nexus ERP cover this step in full.

Businesses starting fresh, with no prior books to bring across, can skip this step entirely and go straight to their first sale; the sign-up defaults are already enough of a foundation to post correctly from a zero opening position.

Step six: record your first sale

With settings, users, payment accounts and opening balances in place, record one real or test sale to see the whole chain work end to end. A stationery shop in Germany raises a credit invoice for a business customer: notebooks worth EUR 250.00 before tax, at the German standard VAT rate of 19%, giving VAT of EUR 47.50 and a total of EUR 297.50.

Because Auto-post Sales Transactions was already switched on at sign-up, the invoice posts to the ledger the moment it is saved: debit Accounts Receivable 297.50, credit Sales 250.00, credit VAT Output 47.50. When the customer pays by bank transfer two weeks later, the payment posts its own entry: debit Bank 297.50, credit Accounts Receivable 297.50. If a stocked product were involved, cost of goods sold and inventory would post at the same time, which our guide on automatic journal entries explains in full.

• Sale: debit Accounts Receivable 297.50 / credit Sales 250.00 / credit VAT Output 47.50
• Check: 250.00 + 47.50 = 297.50
• Payment: debit Bank 297.50 / credit Accounts Receivable 297.50

Common mistakes in the first week

Most first-week problems come from skipping a step rather than getting one wrong, so this list is really an order of operations.

• Recording live sales before checking the Business tab's financial year start month, which can leave your first fiscal year starting on the wrong date
• Inviting staff before roles exist, which leads to everyone sharing the owner's login and no real segregation of duties
• Adding a payment account, such as a second bank, without linking it to a general ledger account, so its money never reaches the balance sheet
• Entering opening balances before the chart of accounts and default accounts are confirmed, which means redoing them once a mapping changes
• Assuming automatic posting still needs switching on: for a business that signed up itself, it is already on, so check the toggles rather than flipping them

What to check at the end of week one

Before you consider set-up finished, run two reports. Fiscal Authority, Reports, Trial Balance should show a zero Difference once your opening balances and first transactions are in. Fiscal Authority, Reports, Data Verification compares the trial balance, the general ledger transactions and the POS transactions, which is the fastest way to spot a document that never posted, usually because of a switched-off toggle, a missing mapping or a date outside any fiscal period.

Once both come back clean, week one is genuinely done: the business is provisioned, configured to your own numbers, and proven by a real transaction that flowed straight through to the ledger.