Your First 5 Minutes with AskBiz

Your first 5 minutes look different depending on what you picked during onboarding. If you chose Market stall, Restaurant/Food stand, Shop/Kiosk, Salon/Barbershop, or Repair Shop, you're on the POS track — jump to "The POS Track" below. Everyone else (Courier, Ecommerce, Services, Distributor, Manufacturer, Importer, Exporter) is on the Business Intelligence track — the rest of this guide is for you. See the Complete Onboarding Guide if you haven't finished signing up yet.

After picking your business type and confirming your location, you land on a "Nice work" screen. Tap Start free — up to 5 staff and AskBiz creates your 4-digit till PIN on the spot — note it down, it's shown once. You're taken straight to your real POS dashboard, no separate setup step first. The first time you land there, a short guided tour walks you through adding your first staff member — their name, a phone number or email, and a PIN for them to log in at the till. Tap Skip tour if you'd rather do that later. From there you're ready to process your first sale.

After onboarding, you land on your Home dashboard. It'll look empty at first — that's normal, AskBiz needs at least one connected data source before it can show you anything. Click the plug icon in the sidebar to open /sources, and choose the tool your business uses most — Shopify, QuickBooks, Stripe, Xero, Amazon, or WooCommerce are the most popular starting points. You'll be asked to log in to that tool and grant read-only access — AskBiz never writes data back to your connected tools. Once connected, your first sync starts automatically: small accounts sync in under 60 seconds, larger accounts (2+ years of data) may take 3–5 minutes.

Once your data syncs, your Business Pulse score appears — a 0–100 score summarising your business health across revenue, profit, cash flow, and growth.

• 70–100: Strong — keep doing what's working
• 50–69: Stable — one or two areas need attention
• Below 50: Action needed — tap the score for a breakdown

Tap any category in the Pulse breakdown to see the specific metric pulling it down.

Click Ask AskBiz in the sidebar. Type a plain-English question like:

• "What was my best-selling product last month?"
• "How is my profit margin trending?"
• "Which customers haven't ordered in 60 days?"

AskBiz analyses your live data and answers in seconds — and if it doesn't have enough data to answer, it tells you what's missing rather than guessing. You don't need to know SQL or build any reports.

Go to Alerts and create one alert — for example: "Tell me if my daily revenue drops more than 20% versus last week."

Alerts run automatically and notify you by email. Most users set up 2–3 alerts in their first week and save hours of manual checking.