Castaway Cloud accounts are Org hierarchies under the management of an Organisation Owner. In order to set you and your firm or your company up for success, we offer some best-practice steps to set up and maintain your Org. Even if you are just commencing an evaluation of Castaway Cloud, these steps are a useful guide.
There are many customers who have intuitively set up their Orgs the way they want to operate. If you are having trouble deciding the best way to set up your Org, please follow these steps or contact our CS Team for some guidance.
Throughout this process, please keep in mind that there is only ONE action that is irreversible. That is, Deleting a Project. Deleting Projects is permanent and irreversible process. Our engineers cannot recover deleted projects. Even our SaaS host, Microsoft Azure, will not be able to recover deleted Projects. While most of you reading this will not have gotten to the stage of building your first Project, once you are comfortable with this important warning, please proceed...
Setting up your Org
Start with an Evaluation
- The intended Org Owner sets up an evaluation of Castaway Cloud (HERE).
- The Org Owner should become familiar with Castaway Cloud terminology. You can find an explainer for that HERE. These terms will be used throughout this article.
- The Org Owner is the person who will be responsible for maintaining the assets in an Org account (Users, Guests, Brands, References and Projects). The Org Owner is usually, but not always, the credit card holder, able to subscribe and cancel an Org account. While the Org Owner can be changed by our CS team upon written request at any time, it is best-practice to set up your Org from the start with the right person as the Org Owner.
Set up Your Brand/s and Resource/s
- The Org Owner manages the company's Brand and Resources. While this doesn't have to be the earliest task, it's important that management oversight is given to Brand and Resources. Larger companies and firms may choose to invite their Marketing or Brand team to manage this aspect of the Org.
- Customers have always been keen to apply a company brand to their Castaway reports and other output. Branding your output adds an extra level of professionalism, polish and beauty to your reporting. You can create and customise Brands HERE.
- The role of Disclaimers is to significantly reduce, and at times eliminate, liability. Accountants and Advisors will almost never issue a report without these cautionary statements. Instructions to manage Disclaimers is HERE.
Invite your Colleagues to the Org
- Org Owners are encouraged to invite colleagues to their Org who will be building, maintaining or delivering Castaway Projects. When you invite a someone to your Org, they are a "trusted colleague" and User. By default, Users in your Org can access ALL of the Org's Projects, unless Projects that require protecting have been labelled "Private". Projects that require protecting include the company or firm's own forecast, or that of a sensitive/ confidential client. Other cases for Private Projects include scenario planning where the scenario or concept needs to remain confidential.
- Colleagues can be invited as Administrators or Analysts. The distinctions are HERE and HERE.
- The instructions to add your colleagues to your Org are HERE. If you make an error during setup, or you want to remove a colleague anytime in the life of your subscription, instructions to do that are HERE.
- It is important to manage your Users and to that end, we recommend you establish internal processes and workflows for User activities early. These activities will include: Creating New Projects, inviting Guests and Deleting Projects.
Now you have completed the basics for setting up your Organisation, you will be eager to start working with Castaway Cloud and have your team work with the product.
You are now ready to:
- Purchase a Subscription
- Attend role-based Training
- Create Projects
- Invite (external) Guests to Projects
Some popular Project functions to be familiar with early are:
Please contact Castaway's CS team if you would like clarification of the instructions above or if you have a query.
Happy forecasting!