Set up your company

This guide is for the person setting up Pointmap for a company, and for anyone helping them. The Cards and fields pages say which buttons to press. These pages say what to choose, and why.

Read in this order

1. How fields, card types and templates fit together: the four ideas.
2. Start from the reports you want: the questions to answer first.
3. Make a new field or reuse one: where each piece of information belongs.
4. Choose what a point shows: color, ring, flags and labels.
5. Set up a company, step by step: the order to do it in.
6. Example setups: ten kinds of company, each built out.
7. Get answers from your AI app: ask about your points in plain words.
8. Set up your company with an AI app: ask it to make fields, card types and access.
9. Every display option: each option and rule, for looking things up.

The short version

• A card type is a kind of point. A wall, a hold-down, an issue. Each point has one card, so for now “card type” and “kind of point” mean the same thing.
• A field is one question, and it is shared. Every card type that asks Status asks the same Status, so its answers add up across all of them.
• What a field means is shared. What it shows on the point is not. The name and choices belong to the field. Each card type decides what that field puts on its own points.
• Start from the reports. If you’ll want to count or sort by something, it needs its own field.
• Keep the plan quiet. A point can show a lot at once. Show what someone needs to see from across the sheet, and leave the rest on the card.

Before you suggest a setup

Helping someone else set up, as a colleague or an AI app? Do these first:

1. Ask the questions in Start from the reports you want.
2. Look at the company’s card types and fields. Reuse what’s there before you suggest anything new.
3. Check each display idea against the rules in Every display option. Some combinations aren’t allowed, and some quietly draw nothing.
4. Say why you’re suggesting each field and each thing on the point, so the person can disagree.

AI apps can read a company’s card types and fields but can’t change them yet. Have one lay out the setup as a plan, and make the changes in Setup.