Your First Look at MonuDesk

When you first log in to a new account, a short welcome window sets up your team, a first cemetery and your order cards, and you pick your plan. Then you land on the Orders board with two demo orders already loaded, Alice Doe and John Jones (Erika Mustermann and Petra Beispiel if you signed up in German), and a note reading These are your two demo orders. They are here to help you get familiar with the app before entering your own data. Got it hides the note and keeps them; Remove demo orders takes them off your board. A Shop Setup checklist on the right edge of the screen walks you through the rest of your setup. Learn more: Your Shop Setup Checklist

You'll move around MonuDesk using the left navigation down the side of the screen and the top bar across the top. Here's what each part does.

The left navigation

The left side of the screen is your main menu. From here you can jump to:

• Orders: your order board, where you'll spend most of your time.

• Dashboard: an at-a-glance home screen for what needs your attention.

• Inventory: stock on hand and items that sync in from your orders.

• Conversations: your built-in email inbox. It sits between Inventory and Order Summary. More on this below.

• Order Summary, Open Balances, Tax Report and Installations: high-level views of your business, each with its own entry.

• Gallery (Pro, marked with a blue New pill): every photo and drawing uploaded to your orders, filed into folders by monument type or service type.

• Contacts: your customers, monument companies, cemeteries, and funeral homes.

• Settings: at the very bottom, where you configure your account.

On a short screen, Roadmap hides first, then Monucademy, and then the menu list scrolls. Settings always stays visible at the bottom, and both links come back when the window grows.

The top bar

Across the top of the screen you'll find a few quick controls:

• New Quote: hover this button for a short menu with Create New Quote, Create Quote with MonuStudio (start by designing the stone in 3D), Create Quote from Paper Order (MonuDesk reads a photo or PDF of a paper order and fills in New Quote for you to check) and Order Drafts (N), where N is how many quotes you've saved but have not finished.

• The notification bell: a red badge shows your unread count. Open it to see when work has been assigned to you or an install is rescheduled. More on this below.

• The office switcher: if your company has more than one location, this button (showing the current office, or All Locations) lets you move between them. If you only have one location, you won't see it.

Orders

This is where you'll spend most of your time. Orders are displayed as cards organized into columns called stages. The board flows from left to right:

Quote → Confirmed Order → In Production → Installation Scheduled → Ready to Install → Completed

You can click any order card to open it and see all the details, or hold and drag a card to move it between stages.

The stages are fully customizable from Settings → Stages. You can also add your own stages between Quote and Confirmed Order, such as Quote sent. An order in one of them still counts as a quote until it reaches Confirmed Order.

Order To-Dos

Every order has its own to-do checklist. Click on a to-do to cycle through its steps, or click the checkmark button to complete it. These track every step from payment collection to final installation.

To customize your to-dos, click the settings icon at the top right of the order card. It shows while Show order details is on in the board toolbar. You can create your own workflow steps to match exactly how your company operates.

Conversations

Find it in the left navigation under Conversations, between Inventory and Order Summary. It's MonuDesk's built-in email inbox.

Connect your Gmail or Microsoft Outlook account, and you can read and reply to customers, cemeteries, and vendors without leaving MonuDesk. Email is grouped into one thread per contact, and you can link a thread to a contact and to one or more orders, so a customer's whole history sits right next to the order it belongs to. You can even attach files that are already on a linked order.

To get started, open it from the sidebar. The first time you open Conversations, a welcome screen greets you where you can connect your Gmail or Microsoft Outlook account and start emailing.

Notifications

The bell in the top bar keeps you posted. A red badge shows how many unread notifications you have (it reads 99+ once you pass 99).

You'll get a notification when someone assigns you an order or a task, checks off a to-do on an order assigned to you, @-mentions you in a note, or reschedules an install on an order assigned to you. You also get one when a family accepts the contract on an order assigned to you in the customer portal, and, with Drawing Reminders switched on in Settings → Order Alerts, when a confirmed order assigned to you still has no drawing. Click a notification to jump straight to the order, task, or calendar event it's about, and use Mark all read to clear them. Notifications are personal. You only ever see your own. To choose which notifications reach your phone, open Settings → Profile and use the Notifications card.

Settings

Click Settings at the bottom of the left navigation to configure your account. This is where you manage your cemeteries, vendors, team members, to-do steps (To-Dos), Stages and Accessories, each on a page of its own. Settings opens to the list of sections, grouped under headings such as Account, Order Creation and Workflow & Pipeline, so pick the one you want and it opens on the right.

Already have your cemeteries, vendors, contacts or open orders in a spreadsheet? Bring them in with Settings → Import. Every plan can use it.

Using MonuDesk on your phone

Open MonuDesk in your phone's browser and, on any screen narrower than a tablet, it switches to a phone layout on its own, with the dashboard and each order laid out for a small screen. A tablet or computer keeps the full app. See Using MonuDesk on Your Phone for a tour. On an iPhone you can also download the MonuDesk app from the App Store. Learn more: The MonuDesk iPhone App

On a computer, Get the iPhone app in the left navigation, above Roadmap, opens MonuDesk on your iPhone: point your iPhone camera at the QR code to open the App Store, or click Open in the App Store.

What's New

At the bottom left of your screen, you will see a small popup when new features are released. Click it to read the latest changelog. You can also access the Roadmap and a link to the Helpdesk from the same area.

Related articles:

• Understanding the Order Board

• How to Start a New Quote

• How to Invite Your Team