First Steps: Account Checklist

The ordered path from an empty Rotor account to your first job on the schedule. Do the foundation settings first, the money and messaging setup before you go live, and the operational tuning in week two.

Written By Support Team

Last updated 5 days ago

A brand-new Rotor account is mostly empty on purpose — it needs to know your services, your prices, your people, and your hours before it can do anything useful. This checklist puts those setup tasks in the order that causes the least rework. Follow it top to bottom and you'll finish with a real customer, a real service plan, and a real job on the schedule.

Each step links to the full article for that topic. Come back here when you finish one.

How this checklist is organized

Setup falls into three waves:

Do this first — the foundation. Skipping these means re-entering data later, because almost every other screen in Rotor pulls from them.
Do this before you go live — payments and messaging. These involve outside approval (Stripe verification, phone carrier registration), so start them early even if you're not ready to use them.
Do this in week two — the operational tuning you'll want once real work is flowing.

Most of this is desktop-only. Team management, imports, and settings all live in the web app. [VERIFY: is every Settings page in this checklist desktop-only, or are some now editable from the mobile app?]

Do this first: the foundation

Fill in Business Settings. Go to Settings → Business Settings and confirm your business email, phone number, time zone, business hours, tax rates, logo, and brand colors. Some fields may already be filled in from onboarding. Business hours control when automations send and when jobs can be scheduled, so set them before you build anything that runs on a schedule. See Business Settings.
Set up Customization. Go to Settings → Customization and define your tags, lead sources, lead stages, service types, and service frequencies. This matters more than it sounds: lead source is required on every lead and customer, and service types control which line items appear during signup. Put your most common lead source at the top of the list — it becomes the default. See Customization.
Build your price book. Go to Settings → Line Items and create a line item for every service you sell — for example Exterior Window Cleaning at a flat $250, or Interior Window Cleaning at $5 per pane. Assign each one a service type so it shows up in the right place. See Line Items.
Invite your team. Go to Settings → Team, check how many seats you have, and invite your techs and reps. Assign Admin only to people who should see every lead, customer, and setting; use Member for technicians and sales reps. Invites sometimes land in the promotions folder. See Team.
Import your existing book of business. Go to Settings → Import Data, download the template for leads or customers, and map your columns. Do this after Customization so your tags, lead sources, and service types already exist and the imported records land in the right buckets. Clean addresses matter here — they're what places customers correctly on the map. See Importing Data.

Do this before you go live

These two steps depend on outside approval, so start them the same week you start step 1.

Connect Stripe. Go to Settings → Stripe and complete Stripe Connect registration. Nothing about invoicing, cards on file, or payouts works until this shows Ready to Accept Payments. Enter your legal business name and EIN exactly as they appear on your government paperwork — mismatches are the most common cause of verification delays. Saved cards cannot be transferred from a previous software's Stripe account. See Stripe.
Set up Engagement. Go to Settings → Engagement to register your SMS number and, optionally, connect your own sending domain for email. Carrier campaign registration requires your EIN, legal business name and address, and a public link showing you collect texting consent — a Rotor web form with a required phone field and a consent checkbox works well. Approval usually takes two to three days, sometimes a week. See Engagement.
Port your existing number, if you have one. If your customers already know a business number, bring it with you instead of starting over. You'll need your account number and transfer PIN from your current provider, and the process takes a few business days. See Porting Numbers to Rotor.

Now book your first job

With the foundation in place, run one real signup end to end. It's the fastest way to find anything you missed.

Create a lead or a customer — or open one you just imported. Remember that jobs can't be created for a lead until you convert them to a customer.
From the customer's profile, click New Plan and configure a service plan: start date, service type, frequency (say, quarterly for a pest plan), and line items from your price book.
If agreements are enabled on your account, generate the agreement and have it signed in person on a mobile device or sent as a link.
Choose how jobs get created — schedule the first job only, schedule all of them, or send them all to the pending queue.
Confirm the job appears on the schedule with a technician assigned.

The full walkthrough is in Service Plans.

Do this in week two

Set technician availability and crews. Once you have more than a couple of jobs a day, the schedule only works if Rotor knows who's available when. See Crew Scheduling.
Get comfortable with pending jobs. They let you mark that a customer is due in December without committing a crew and time slot yet. See Pending Jobs.
Connect your integrations. Meta lead ads, Housecall Pro, the Rotor API, and Zapier all live under Settings→ Integrations.
Turn on notifications and automations. Add a phone number to your profile and enable account activity notifications so new leads reach you in real time.
Get your field team on mobile. Have every tech and rep install the app and log in with the credentials from their invite.

What each step unlocks

Step	What it unlocks
Business Settings	Correct time zone and business hours, sales tax on invoices, and your logo and colors on quotes, agreements, forms, and the customer portal
Customization	Lead sources, lead stages, service types, and frequencies — required on nearly every record you create afterward
Line Items	Priced services you can attach to a job, a quote, or a service plan
Team	Logins for your crew, role-based visibility, and the technician list your schedule is built on
Importing Data	Your existing customers and leads in Rotor and pinned on the map
Stripe	Cards on file, invoicing, one-off charges, refunds, and payouts
Engagement	A registered number for two-way texting and a sender email that lands in inboxes
Porting Numbers	Keeping the number your customers already call
Service Plans	Recurring revenue, signed agreements, and jobs that generate themselves
Crew Scheduling	Availability, crews, and visits on a calendar your techs can actually work from

Tips for a smooth setup

Start Stripe and phone registration on day one — they wait on other people, everything else waits on you.
Do Customization before your import. Tags and service types that don't exist yet can't be assigned to imported records.
Don't try to configure everything. Hide features you don't use under Settings → Customization and come back to them later.
Run one full signup yourself before you train the team on it.
If a feature you expected isn't visible, it may not be enabled on your plan — ask support rather than assuming it's missing.

Congratulations! Your account is configured end to end, and you can take a customer from signup to a scheduled job without stopping to fix a setting.

Have additional questions? Our team is ready to help you succeed. Contact us through the chat or drop us an email at support@getrotor.com.