Set up Stairkey to fit the way your business runs

1. Start with the right edition

At sign-up, Stairkey asks what kind of business you run. All three editions share the same workspace — the edition just decides which tools are front and centre.

If you do more than one thing (plenty of contractors also hold a real estate licence), pick the edition closest to your daily work. The other tools stay available.

• Service business: recurring visit scheduling, crew availability, plain line-item estimates and invoices, client CRM, and recurring billing.
• Contractor: everything above, plus the measured Takeoff Builder, change orders, job tracking, and the contractor portal for subs.
• Real estate: deal pipeline with offer tracking, showings, condition templates, critical dates, and property records.

2. Add your team — and give each person the right amount of app

Invite people from settings and assign a role: admin, staff, limited, or contractor. The role decides what each person can see and touch, so the office manager isn't wading through accounting screens and the new hire can't delete a client.

Group people into teams or crews that match how work actually gets assigned — the schedule and assignments follow the same structure.

Subs and vendors don't need full seats at all: the contractor portal gives them a focused, phone-first surface for time, expenses, receipts, assigned project tasks, and jobsite updates.

3. Make the sidebar and dashboard yours

You can reorder the sidebar navigation and choose which dashboard cards appear — by role or by user. A field crew lead might open the app to today's schedule; the owner might want outstanding invoices and pipeline first.

Ten minutes here pays off every single morning: the screen people land on should answer their first question of the day.

4. Decide what clients see

The client portal replaces status-update phone calls: clients sign in to see where things stand, approve work, and upload files. Approvals collected there land on the job record, and client uploads file themselves against the right job instead of your inbox.

This is also where scope stays honest — estimate approvals and change orders live on the record the client can see, so "I never agreed to that" conversations get shorter.

5. Set your billing rhythm

Match invoicing to how you actually charge. One-off jobs become invoices when the work wraps. Repeat services bill from completed scheduled visits — no retyping the week. Retainers and memberships run as recurring invoices.

Whatever the rhythm, draft, sent, and paid status stays beside the job with outstanding totals visible, so month-end isn't an archaeology dig.

6. Turn on add-ons when the business asks for them

Stairkey's optional add-ons are part of the same workspace, not separate products. The accounting add-on (+$20/mo) turns on double-entry books where invoices, expenses, and change orders post from the records they came from. The website add-on (+$10/mo) publishes a simple public site — services, gallery, contact details, service areas, and testimonials — without another CMS.

There's no migration moment: turn an add-on on when the business needs it, and the data it needs is already there. Full pricing, including the monthly caps, is on the pricing page.

7. Let the assistant do the typing

Moving in from spreadsheets or another system? The built-in AI assistant imports contacts from a CSV, PDF, photo, or pasted list — it extracts the records, you review every one on a confirmation screen, then commit. It never invents data or saves anything without you.

Day to day it answers questions about your own workspace in plain language and drafts client messages that you review and send.