First steps

You can sign in and you are looking at an empty Home. The quickest way from here to a working setup is the setup helper: Set up in the rail, under Home. It interviews you for about ten minutes, builds a plan in the right order for your business, and walks you through each part with recommendations, a preview of every change and live checks that prove it worked. This page gets you started and covers the basics you will want in the first hour either way. Each step links to the full guide.

A new Tenvara starts small: the service desk (tickets, customers and contacts, the portal, your team and the automation behind notifications) is on, and every other module your licence includes is off until an administrator switches it on in Settings > Modules. That keeps the menus short while you learn the service desk. Step 5 below shows how to turn on the next module.

1. Secure your own account#

You are the first administrator, so your account can change everything. Protect it first.

1. Open the account menu (your initials, top right) and choose Password and two-factor.
2. Under Two-factor authentication, press Set up two-factor and follow the steps with an authenticator app. You can also add a passkey.
3. Keep the recovery codes you are shown somewhere safe. They are shown once.

Then decide whether everyone must use two-factor: see Passwords and two-factor. The setup helper will not let you go live until every administrator uses a second factor.

2. Start the setup helper#

1. Press Set up in the rail. Only administrators see it.
2. Press Start with discovery and answer the questions about your business: how big you are, what you sell, the tools you use now and how you want to go live. Anything you are not sure about, press I don't know, pick for me.
3. Look at Your plan: the sections you need, in order, with how long the work is and whether your target date is realistic.
4. Go back to the hub and press Carry on to open the first section. One of the first, Your names, asks for your company's full name and a short name, which Tenvara uses to say who it is when it checks your customers' websites.

You do not have to do it all at once, or alone: assign sections to colleagues, and come back whenever you like. Everything is saved as you go. See The setup helper.

Tip: Press Make a practice customer on the discovery page for a sample customer with contacts, devices and tickets you can try things on. It is never billed, reported on or counted against your licence. See The practice customer and plan export.

The steps below are the ones most people do in the first hour. The setup helper covers each of them too (in Customers and import, Staff, roles, teams and sign-in, Agent and rollout and Customer portal, chat and phone), with checks that they worked.

3. Add your first customer#

A customer is a company you look after. Sites, contacts and devices hang off it.

1. Go to Customers (it opens on Active) and press New customer (or New in the top bar, then Customer).
2. Enter the Name. The Code is made from the name if you leave it blank.
3. Set the Status: Active, Onboarding or Inactive.
4. Add the Email, Phone and Website if you have them, and choose the Account manager and Technical lead.
5. Optionally fill in the Customer type, Industry and People (how many work there), which reports and presentations use. External reference is the company's id in another PSA, if you sync with one.
6. If you are taking the company over from another provider, tick Taking over from another provider. The customer starts in takeover mode: agents enrol and report, but nothing acts by itself until you turn it off. See Takeover mode.
7. Press Create customer (or Cmd+Enter).

Open the customer to add its sites and contacts on the People and sites tab. Contacts are the people who raise tickets and can use the customer portal.

A new customer starts in onboarding mode for its first days: everything Tenvara finds goes into one findings report, not a flood of alerts and tickets, until you mark the customer live. See Onboarding mode and going live.

Tip: Add your own company as a customer too. It gives your internal machines and internal tickets a home.

Moving from another PSA? The setup helper's Customers and import section takes CSV exports from HaloPSA, ConnectWise Manage, Autotask and Syncro. See Importing from other PSAs.

4. Invite your team#

1. Go to Settings > Users and press Invite people.
2. Paste one or more Email addresses, one per line or separated by commas.
3. Choose a Role, such as Service desk technician or Finance and accounts, and optionally Teams and Customers.
4. Press Send invitation.

Each person gets an email with a link to set up their account. The link works once, for 7 days. See Users and Roles and permissions.

To let your team sign in with Microsoft 365 or Google instead, set up Single sign-on first, with Create accounts on first sign-in turned on. Then there is nothing to invite: people sign in and get an account with the role your rules give them.

5. Switch on the next module#

Administrators of a new install see a Turn on more of Tenvara card on Home that names the module most teams turn on next, with what it gives you and an Enable button. See all opens Settings > Modules, which lists every module as On, Suggested next or Everything else.

1. Go to Settings > Modules.
2. Press Enable on the module you want, for example Monitoring, which brings the Devices area and the agent.
3. If it needs another module, Tenvara says so and turns that on too.
4. The setup helper opens on that module's own steps, so you can set it up straight away.

Turn modules on one at a time as you get to them. A module that is off is gone from the menus, search and Home and its work stops, but its data is kept. See Switching modules on.

6. Install the agent#

Devices appear in Tenvara once the agent is installed on them and enrolled with a customer. The Devices area appears once the Monitoring module is on (step 5).

1. Go to Devices and press Add devices (or Devices > Enrolment and New token).
2. Choose the Customer and, if you like, a Site. Devices enrolled with this token are placed there.
3. Give the token a Name so you can tell tokens apart later, for example "Office rollout".
4. Choose when it Expires after (1 day to 1 year, or never) and, optionally, the Maximum devices it can enrol.
5. Press Create token.

Tenvara then shows the command to run on each machine for Windows, macOS and Linux. The agent installs, enrols with this customer and appears under Devices, usually within a minute. Installers to download are on Devices > Enrolment, the Installers tab. Full details are in Installing the agent, rolling out with Group Policy or Intune in Deploying the Windows agent, and which systems are covered in Supported systems.

What the agent does once it is installed (inventory, monitoring, patching, remote control and so on) is set in Devices and agent. Have a look at Remote session consent there before anyone remotes in, so it matches what you have agreed with your customers. The setup helper's Remote access section asks about this and sets it for you.

7. Open the customer portal#

Contacts sign in to the portal to raise and follow tickets, approve things and see what you do for them.

1. Go to Settings > Customer portal. On General, check Portal is On.
2. Type the Portal name, usually your company name, and press Save name, so contacts see who they are talking to.
3. Copy the Address and put it in your email signature or on your website.
4. On Access and sign-in, choose how contacts may sign in.
5. On each contact who should use the portal, press Turn on portal access in the Customer portal card, then Invite to portal.

See Setting up the portal and The customer portal.

8. Keep going with the plan#

Work through the rest of your plan from the hub: email to tickets, SLAs, alerts and on-call, backup, Microsoft 365, contracts and billing, and the rest. When every must-pass check passes, press We're live, and the helper keeps watching from Home > Health. See Go-live and Health.

Checklist#