How to set up your company account
Everything under Account decides how your company turns up in front of other people. Your letterhead, your reference numbers, the address on a purchase order and the bank details on an invoice all come from here, set once rather than typed each time. It is twenty minutes on day one that saves a lot of reissued paperwork later.
- Where it lives
- Account in the sidebar, under My company.
- Why it matters
- These fields print on every quote, PO and invoice.
- Do it when
- On day one, before you send anything to anyone.
- Who can
- Admins. Most of it is set once and rarely touched again.
Before you start
Gather these and the whole thing is one sitting:
- Your company registration and VAT numbers.
- The bank details you want customers to pay into.
- A square PNG of your logo, under 2MB.
- The email addresses each department should receive at.
Open Account
Account in the lower part of the sidebar opens on My company, a row of tabs that between them hold everything about your business.
This guide covers the ones that decide how you appear and how the account is run. Users and Roles have their own guide, and Integrations is where Google Drive connects.
Company details
The first tab is your identity: company name, registration number, VAT number, type of business, year established, UTR and website. Sync tells you what it does with them, and it is worth reading: these appear "on quotes, purchase orders, invoices, emails, and other communications with your customers, trade partners, and engineers".
In other words this is your letterhead. A wrong registration number here is a wrong registration number on everything you send.
We'll show these details on quotes, purchase orders, invoices, emails, and other communications with your customers, trade partners, and engineers.
We'll show the address entered here on purchase orders, emails, and other communications.
We'll show these details on invoices you send to your customers.
Your company address
Address line 1, town and postcode are required. This is the address that prints on purchase orders and emails, so use your registered or trading address rather than a site office.
One hard limit sits on this panel: your company must be based in the UK to use Sync. If it is not, that is a conversation with your account manager rather than a field you can work around.
Bank details for invoicing
Under Invoicing, the bank account name, number and sort code are all required. IBAN and SWIFT/BIC are optional and worth filling in if you ever bill outside the UK.
Quote expiry and finance
Two more settings sit at the foot of the same tab.
Default note/memo prints on invoices, which is the place for standard payment terms wording. Quote expiration (in days) is the default every new quote starts with, so set it once here instead of changing it quote by quote. Leave it blank to disable expiry entirely.
Finance settings holds the Access Financials connection. With Sync with Access on and a database name set, projects, trade partners and purchase orders keep themselves in step with your accounts package.
Email and document details
The second tab is the one most accounts never get round to, and it shows. It controls the addresses on your outbound email, your reference formats and your logo.
Email contacts to be displayed on various emails and pdfs. Note that email addresses can be reused.
Apply styling to your PDFs for a polished look, or leave them plain for a simple format.
Company logo to be displayed on emails and pdfs.
Maximum file size: 2Mb.
The department addresses
Five addresses are required, and Sync notes that they can be reused, so a smaller business can point all five at one mailbox without a problem.
Your general address, and the one most of your outbound email points back at.
Where compliance correspondence goes. Worth pointing at a shared mailbox rather than a person.
The one customers will reply to about an invoice.
Where health and safety matters land.
Gets a copy of every PO you send, which gives you an audit trail outside Sync as well as in it.
A sixth, Purchase order from email, is optional and sets what a supplier sees in the From line of a PO.
Your purchase order prefix
Purchase order prefix is the few letters in front of every PO number you raise, so a prefix of NBP produces NBP458. Keep it short and recognisable: suppliers will quote it back to you on delivery notes and invoices for years.
Your project reference prefix
The same idea for projects, and the one setting on this page with a warning printed under it: "Applies to projects created after you save. Existing project references stay as they are."
That is worth taking literally. Change it halfway through a year and you will be living with two formats side by side indefinitely, because nothing retrofits. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is a decision rather than an accident, so make it on day one.
Logo and PDF styling
Your logo appears on emails and PDFs. Sync asks for a square image in PNG format, up to 2MB, and a square frame is the part people miss: a wide wordmark dropped in here will not sit well, so export a square version with some padding around it.
PDF Styling is a single toggle. On, your documents get the styled treatment with your logo and a header band. Off, they come out plain. Either is fine; the styled version simply looks more like something a business sent on purpose.
Raise a test quote afterwards and look at the PDF. It is the quickest way to see all of this working together: your logo, your address, your registration and VAT numbers, and the payment terms held against that customer.
Enforce two-factor
The Security tab holds one control: Enforce 2FA, applied to every user on the account at once.
Turn it on and users must authenticate with a password and a six-digit code from an authenticator app such as Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator. Anyone who has not set it up is required to before they can use Sync again, and enforcement takes effect immediately.
Worth a word to the team before you press it, rather than after.
Read the activity log
The Activity log is a running record of who did what across the whole account: quotes raised, POs added, credentials updated, portals linked, reports logged, users changed.
It filters by module, twelve of them from Authentication through to Purchase orders, and by event type: created, updated, deleted or other. Each entry carries the time, the person, what they did and which record it happened on.
Showing activity from the last 30 days. Choose Export all data to download the last 6 months of activity (unfiltered, all columns). Older entries are also available on individual project, supplier, and PO activity tabs.
Export six months of it
The screen holds 30 days. Export & Download gives you the last six months, unfiltered and with every column, which is the version to reach for in a dispute or an audit.
Older than six months, the trail has not gone: individual projects, suppliers and purchase orders each keep their own activity tab, and those go back further.
Explore with demo data
If the account is new, Demo data is the most useful tab on this page. One press populates it with sample customers, projects, trade partners, CVR lines, quotes, POs and invoices, so there is something to click through before any real data exists.
The important part is that it is safe. Every demo record is labelled [DEMO] and excluded from dashboards, exports and the Access ERP feed, so nothing it creates can quietly skew a figure or reach your accounts package. When you have found your feet, Delete demo data removes the batch.
Populate this account with a small set of sample customers, projects, and trade partners so you can explore Sync before real data exists. Demo records are labelled with [DEMO] and are excluded from dashboards, exports, and Access ERP.
Billing and the account owner
Billing shows your current plan and user allowance, and takes the details that appear on the invoices Sync sends you: a billing name, a billing VAT number and, if it differs from your company address, a separate billing address.
Two things catch people out here. The billing VAT number is a different field from the one on Company details: that one is shown to your customers, this one appears on receipts from Sync to you. And the billing contact defaults to the account owner if you leave it blank. The owner is changed from the Users tab, by editing a user and choosing Make owner.
More tenancies, and closing one
Create new tenancy, top right, sets up another account under the same login, and offers all four editions: Main Contractor, Subcontractor Portal, Customer Portal and Sync Lite, which is capped at three users. Useful for a group with more than one trading company, and for anyone who needs to see both sides of a portal.
What you can and cannot do
- Change any of these at any time, as often as you need.
- Point several departments at the same mailbox.
- Set a default quote expiry so nobody has to think about it per quote.
- Turn PDF styling off for a plainer document.
- Enforce two-factor authentication across every user at once.
- Export six months of account activity as a file.
- Create sample data to learn on, then delete it in one press.
- Run more than one tenancy from the same login.
- Register a company based outside the UK. Sync says so on the address panel.
- Change the reference on a project that already exists. The prefix only applies going forward.
- Send an invoice without bank details. Those fields are required for a reason.
- Undo a deactivation. It locks out every user immediately and is final.
- Use one VAT number for both purposes. The customer-facing one is here; your billing one is on the Billing tab.
Common issues
It wants a square PNG. A wide wordmark will not sit well in a square frame, so export a square version with padding around it rather than letting Sync fit it.
That is correct. It only applies to projects created after you save, and existing references never change. You will see the two formats side by side for a while, which is normal.
Check the bank fields on Company details. Account name, number and sort code are required, and without them an invoice has nowhere to be paid.
There are two. The one on Company details is shown to your customers. The one on the Billing tab is what appears on invoices Sync sends you.
They should not. Demo data is labelled [DEMO] and excluded from dashboards, exports and the Access feed. If something looks off, delete the batch from the Demo data tab.
The activity log holds 30 days on screen, filterable by module and event type. Older than that, export it, or check the activity tab on the individual project, supplier or PO.
Day one checklist
An account that is properly set up has:
- Company name, registration number and VAT number are right.
- The address is the one you want on purchase orders.
- Bank details are complete, so invoices can actually be paid.
- All five department addresses point somewhere monitored.
- The PO and project prefixes are what you want to live with.
- A square logo is uploaded and the PDF preview looks right.
- Two-factor is enforced, or you have decided not to.
Summary
To set up your company account in Sync:
- 1Open Account and work through Company details first.
- 2Fill in the identity, the address and the bank fields.
- 3Move to Email & document details for the department addresses.
- 4Set the PO and project reference prefixes before you create projects.
- 5Upload a square logo and check a PDF.
- 6Turn on two-factor, and use demo data to learn on if the account is new.
- 7Come back to the activity log whenever you need to know who did what.
None of this is interesting work, which is exactly why it gets skipped and then shows up on a document in front of a client six months later. Twenty minutes here and every quote, purchase order and invoice you send afterwards looks like it came from a company that has its house in order.