This guide covers the things you set up once and rely on every day after: signing in, your workspace, your company details, the people on your team, and who can see and do what. If you’re the owner setting CortexPM up for the first time, work through it top to bottom. If you’ve been invited to an existing workspace, skip to Signing in and Finding your way around.

Workspaces, companies and projects — how it fits together

Three layers, from the outside in:

Workspace — your building company’s account in CortexPM. Everything your business does lives inside it, kept completely separate from every other CortexPM customer.
Company — the trading entity that appears on your documents (name, ABN, logo, bank details). Most builders have one. If you run more than one entity, you can hold several companies in the one workspace and switch between them.
Project (job) — an individual build. Estimates, contracts, purchase orders, costs and the program all hang off a project.

You sign in to a workspace, work under a company, and do the work inside projects.

Signing in

CortexPM signs you in through a secure login screen.

Go to your workspace address — your-company.cortexpm.app — or the main sign-in page and enter your email.
The first time you sign in, you’ll be asked to verify your email. Open the verification email and follow the link.
After signing in you land on your dashboard.

If you belong to more than one workspace, you’ll be asked to select a workspace before you reach the dashboard. You can switch later from your account menu.

Tip: bookmark your workspace address so you always land in the right place.

First-time setup (new workspace)

When you create a brand-new workspace, CortexPM walks you through a short onboarding:

Your profile — your name and (optionally) a mobile number. Completing this starts your 30-day free trial.
Your company — the business name, ABN, contact details and address that will appear on the documents you send.

You can change any of this later in Company settings. Once onboarding is done you’re taken to the dashboard and can start creating projects.

Finding your way around

The main navigation lists the modules you have access to — Estimating, Takeoff, Job Cost, Purchasing, Accounting, Contracts, Program, Site Management, CRM, Documents, Reports and the portals. What you see depends on your role (see Roles & permissions).

Your account menu (bottom-left of the navigation) is where you reach your own settings, switch workspace or company, and sign out.

Set up your cost codes (do this first)

Cost codes are foundational — set them up before you do anything else. Budgets, purchase orders, supplier invoices, cost-to-complete forecasts, progress claims and reporting all organise themselves around cost codes. If they aren’t in place early, those features can’t work properly and you’ll end up reworking the structure mid-job.

Cost codes are the line items every cost in CortexPM is filed under (e.g. 2.01 Site Establishment, 5.03 Concrete). The quickest way to start: download the cost code template, fill in your standard code list, upload it, and save it as your default cost code set so every new job starts from the same structure.

Full detail — code format, headings, margin/fee flags, and managing cost code sets — is in the Jobs & Job Cost guide, which opens with cost code setup. Do this before you create your first job.

Company settings

Company settings hold everything that appears on the documents you generate and the way the system is branded. Open Company settings from the settings area. Key things to set up:

Business details — company name, ABN, registered address, contact email, phone and website. These flow onto quotes, purchase orders, invoices and contracts.
Logo and brand colours — upload your logo and set your primary, secondary and accent colours. These style your PDFs and emails.
Job number prefix — a 3-letter code (e.g. CTX, ABC, HBC) used to number your projects, like ABC26-042. It must be exactly three letters.
Bank details — account name, bank, BSB and account number for the payment details printed on your invoices, plus an optional reference hint for clients (e.g. “Use invoice number as reference”). Bank details are stored encrypted.
ABA / batch payment settings — the bank code, registered user name, user ID and transaction code used to generate ABA files for paying suppliers and subcontractors in bulk (see the Accounting guide). Only needed if you pay by ABA file.
Default terms — standard terms and conditions that pre-fill on purchase orders and invoices, so you’re not retyping them each time.
Builder licences — record your builder/contractor licence number for each state you operate in (QBCC for QLD, NSW Fair Trading, VBA for VIC, etc.). The right licence is then printed on contract particulars for that project’s jurisdiction.

Watch out: the job number prefix sets how your jobs are numbered going forward. Pick it deliberately before you create projects.

Running more than one company

If your business trades under more than one entity, you can hold several companies in the one workspace.

Open Manage companies.
Create company and fill in its details (each company has its own ABN, logo, bank details and terms).
Switch company from your account menu to change which entity you’re working under. New projects, documents and numbering then use that company’s details.

You can also deactivate a company you no longer trade under without deleting its history.

Document templates

The Template Centre holds reusable templates for your proposals, purchase orders, progress claims, variations, invoices and contracts. Each template controls the wording, section layout and default terms for that document type. Set a default for each type so new documents start from your preferred wording, and create extra named templates (e.g. “Residential Proposal”, “Commercial Proposal”) to switch between as needed.

Price libraries

Settings → Price Libraries is where you keep your rates — your own schedule, a supplier’s catalogue, or both. Estimate lines, purchase orders and client selection options can all be built from them, and you can push real paid rates back in from invoices and purchase orders so your pricing reflects what you actually pay.

Setting them up is covered in Estimating and Purchasing.

Team members, roles and permissions

Inviting your team

Open the team / users area in settings.
Invite a team member by entering their email and choosing their role.
They receive an email invitation with a link. When they accept it and sign in, they join your workspace with the role you set.

From the same screen you can resend an invitation that hasn’t been accepted, cancel one sent in error, or remove a team member who has left.

The roles

CortexPM has a fixed set of roles, each with sensible default access:

Owner — full access to everything, including settings and billing. Always has complete view and edit rights.
Accounts — accounting, purchasing, job cost and settings; lighter access elsewhere.
Project Manager — broad project access across estimating, contracts, purchasing, program, job cost and site.
Contract Administrator — strong on contracts, purchasing, accounting and program.
Site Manager — site management, documents and viewing the program; limited financial access.
Estimator — estimating, takeoff and job cost.
Sales — CRM and estimating.
Client and Subcontractor — external users who only ever see their own portal, never the internal system (covered in the Client Portal and Subcontractor Portal guides).

Field workers

Field Worker is the tenth role, and it works differently from the rest. It’s for the people on the tools — carpenters, labourers, apprentices, concreters. They use the mobile app only and never see the web system.

A field worker gets Site Management and nothing else. No job cost, no purchasing, no accounting, no reports. Within the app they’re limited further: they see only the jobs you’ve crewed them to, and they never see a dollar figure — not a rate, not a budget, not a total.

The role sets what they can access, not what they’re called. Everyone on the tools is a Field Worker; their trade is recorded separately on their crew profile, where it describes what they do without changing their access.

Inviting them. Field workers have their own panel in company settings — Field Workers — separate from office staff so a crew of thirty doesn’t swamp your staff list. Paste in Email addresses, one per line or comma separated, and hit Invite crew. Each person names themselves when they accept. Pending invites sit under Awaiting acceptance.

Watch out: accepting the invite is only half of it. A field worker with no crew assignment sees “You’re not on a crew yet” and can do nothing. Assign them to jobs from the Crew button on the Onsite dashboard — see Site Management.

Roles & permissions

Roles ship with defaults, but you can tune them. Open Role permissions to see a grid of every module down one side and every role across the top. For each role and module you control two things:

View — can open and read that module.
Edit — can create, change and delete in that module.

Adjust the ticks to match how your business works — for example, giving your Site Manager edit rights in Purchasing, or read-only Accounting access to a Project Manager.

Note: the Owner role can’t be locked out — it always has full access. Everyone else is governed by this grid.

Tip: if a teammate says they can’t see a screen or a button described in these guides, this grid is almost always the answer.

Integrations

Xero

CortexPM connects to Xero so invoices, bills and purchase orders sync between the two.

One Xero organisation per company entity. If you trade through more than one company, each one connects to its own Xero organisation and keeps its own sync settings. There’s no single account-wide connection.

Open Settings → Integrations → Connect to Xero and work through the wizard:

Authorise CortexPM in the Xero window, then choose which Xero organisation this company maps to.
Confirm the mapping — you’ll see the Xero organisation and the CortexPM company side by side.
Map cost categories to Xero accounts — which Xero account each CortexPM cost category posts to when bills and invoices push across.
Create the jobs tracking category — one click. This adds a CortexPM Jobs tracking category in Xero with each of your jobs as an option, so Xero transactions can be filtered by job. It’s also what lets CortexPM work out which job an incoming bill belongs to.
Choose what to sync — Purchase Orders, Bills (Supplier Invoices), Sales Invoices, Payments, Contacts / Vendors, and Invoice Documents → Xero Attachments.
Finish Setup — queues the initial import. Data appears in CortexPM as it comes across; a first sync takes a few minutes.

Running a second company. When another of your companies is already connected, you’ll be offered the choice of reusing that connection or connecting a different Xero login. Reuse it if both Xero organisations sit under the same Xero login — authorising a second login for the same Xero user can invalidate the first connection. Reusing doesn’t need a new authorisation — you simply pick which Xero organisation this company maps to.

Ongoing settings. Xero Sync Settings has the same sync toggles, changeable any time — they take effect on the next sync and don’t re-run past ones — plus one field worth getting right:

Import bills dated on or after… is the earliest date CortexPM imports from. Bills, POs and payments dated before it aren’t imported at all, and anything still owing from before it is treated as aged rather than current payables. Most builders set it to the start of the financial year containing their earliest job on CortexPM. Leave it blank and everything imports and everything counts as current.

Tip: moving that date earlier pulls older bills in on the next sync, so it’s recoverable if you set it too late. Setting it too early drags in history you didn’t want.

You can disconnect and reconnect at any time from the same screen. See Accounting and Purchasing for the day-to-day flows.

Your account and billing

Your settings — update your display name and switch between light and dark theme from your account menu.
Billing & subscription — owners manage the plan, see trial status and upgrade from the billing area. Your 30-day trial starts when you complete your profile during onboarding; upgrade before it ends to keep working without interruption.

Where to next

With your workspace, company and team set up, your next setup task is cost codes — get these in place before you create jobs, as budgets, costs, claims and reporting all depend on them. See Jobs & Job Cost, which opens with cost code setup before moving on to creating jobs and budgets.

Getting Started