Congratulations on signing up for a QuickBase account!
Before you dive in, there are a few things you should know about your new account and how things work in QuickBase.
You've subscribed to QuickBase - a Web site that lets you select, customize, and share online workgroup applications.
You and your colleagues can create and use as many applications as you want. There's no limit. QuickBase charges you a base monthly fee which usually includes a fixed number of users. If you have more users, you pay an additional monthly fee for each one. Your account accumulates a user only through access to an application. In other words, when you or any application manager grants a person access to an application, that person becomes a user that counts toward your account. If a user can access an application, he or she is automatically a member of the billing account in which the application lives.
It's possible for a user to be a member of multiple billing accounts. Imagine that your company uses QuickBase to manage its consulting business. Say that Gertie, your lead consultant is a regular user of your QuickBase applications and you pay so she can access data in your account. As part of her consulting duties, Gertie also has access to an application in your client's QuickBase account. Because Gertie is a user of an application in their account, that client also pays so Gertie can access their information. (See image below.)
FAQ - What if a user accesses three
applications in my account? Would I be billed for three users?
No.
You'll be charged only once for that user, no matter how many applications
they access.
Accounts
pay for each single user who accesses
an application in their account.
You'll read more about managing account users in a minute. First, access your QuickBase account. To do so, visit www.quickbase.com, click the Sign In/Register link on the upper right of the screen and sign into QuickBase.
Once you sign in, QuickBase displays the My QuickBase page. Each QuickBase user has their own personal My QuickBase page. This page shows a list of applications that you have visited. These applications may be part of your billing account or belong to another account. You also may have access to applications that don't appear on this list because you never visited them. (To search for an application, click the Adv. Search link.) There's lots more to know about the My QuickBase page.
Because you are the Billing Account Manager, you have a Manage my billing account link on the right side of your My QuickBase page. Click this link to set up your account.
Before you and your colleagues start sharing applications, you should make some fundamental selections to set your account in order.
1. Set Primary Contact.
One person in your group needs to act as the point person for your account. This person will be your Billing Account Contact. To set or change your primary contact, click the Manage my billing account link on your My QuickBase page. On the left side of the Summary tab, click the Edit Account Properties link. The Summary tab changes to show your account properties. Within the Billing Contact email Address box, type in the email address of your primary contact.
2. Select your time zone.
While you're on the Manage Billing Account page, you can change your account's time zone, if necessary. QuickBase time zones are automatically set to Pacific Standard Time. If you live and work in a different time zone, just go to the Account Timezone list and select the correct zone.
3. Allow or prohibit public applications within your account.
One more decision you may want to make before you leave this page is: Do you want to let application managers in your account open their applications to everyone on the internet? QuickBase features the power to make applications public. This is handy if you want to share some information with all the world, but it's also a tool used by application managers who don't want to make their information public, but need to gather information from users they don't know. In other words, many developers use this feature to let the general public submit information, but still block them from viewing any information. Such a setup is commonly used for surveys or to gather requests. It's handy when you're not sure who'll make a submission. The ability to create public applications is turned off when you first open an account. To grant this ability, turn on the Allow Public Applications checkbox on this page. Of course, you don't need to decide now. You can return to this page any time to turn this ability on or off.
When you're done with preliminary account setup, click the Apply Changes button at the bottom of the screen.
FAQ - Can members of the QuickBase support
staff access my data?
No.
QuickBase staff members can access only your basic account information
in order to help you manage your account. But they cannot see any data
in your account's applications unless you explicitly grant them access.
While you're here in the Manage Billing Account screen, take a tour of its other features. Before your applications start getting traffic, you'll want to learn some fundamentals, like how to track usage and manage your account limits. Summarized below are basic account management responsibilities which you can fulfill using the various tabs here on the Manage Billing Account page.
View account usage. The right side of the Summary tab's Account Info section shows you (in percentages) how much of your allocated space and user quota you're consuming.
View application usage. Is one of your application managers using up all your space? Confirm your suspicions on Applications tab. Each application appears listed along with its usage statistics. See how many users and tables each one has. Also view the space each application takes up and see who the manager is.
FAQ - What happens if I go over my limits?
That depends on what limit you cross. If you exceed the number of users
you've purchased, QuickBase emails you until you fix the problem by removing
some users or purchasing an additional user pack. But, if you exceed your
file attachment space or hit the size limit for an individual table, we'll
stop you in your tracks. You won't be able to add any more data until
you clean house or upgrade your account. See Managing
an application's file attachments for more information.
View your service plan. The Summary tab's Account Info section shows what plan you've chosen. To see details on the plan, click its name.
Change your service plan. Time to upgrade? You can change your service plan online. To do so, click the Change plan link on the left side of the Summary tab.
On the left side of the screen, click Change plan.
The Choose a plan page displays. Here you can read about plan details and pricing.
Within the Select a Corporate Monthly Plan section, select the plan you want.
If you want any add-on packs (like additional storage space or extra users) enter the desired quantity.
Click Continue.
The Plan Chosen Summary page displays.
Confirm that the summary shows the plan and add-ons that
you selected and click Approve Selections.
FAQ - Can I pay annually
instead of monthly?
Yes, to choose an annual plan, follow the Steps 1 through 3 above.
On the Choose a plan page, click the Options
for paying annually link on the lower left of the screen.
QuickBase displays some information on annual plans. (Please note
that an annual plan is a year-long commitment. Should you cancel
your account, you'd get no refund for the remaining part of the
year. You can pay by credit card or Invoice/Purchase Order. Add-on
packs are pro-rated to your annual bill date. In other words,
if you sign up for a pack six months into your annual billing
cycle, QuickBase will bill you immediately for the remaining six
months. On your next annual renewal, the pack is automatically
added to your base plan.) If you agree to all conditions, click
Continue. Select a plan, choose any add-on packs
you want and click Continue. QuickBase summarizes
your choices on screen. To confirm, click Approve Selections.
From the Permissions tab you can:
Grant or revoke the power to create applications. You control who can create applications within your account. Read how.
Change or add billing account administrators. Use the controls on this page to get help with your account's administrative tasks or to pass them on to someone else. You can grant varying degrees of permissions to billing account controls. Learn more.
What is a user? A user is an individual who has access to a QuickBase Application. A user is also an individual who has access to a QuickBase Account. How do these two user roles relate to one another?
Simple: If a user can access an application, he or she is automatically a user within the billing account in which the application lives. So, users are added from the bottom up. Only an Application Manager can truly "add" a user and control their role within the application. However, once a user joins an application, the Billing Account Administrator can control some of the user's permissions within the corresponding billing account.
From the Users with Access tab you can:
View details on all users with access to applications in your account. The Users with Access tab lists your users' names, user names, email addresses and user status.
See what applications a user can access. Locate the user you want to know about and click the apps link next to their name. QuickBase shows you every application he or she can access.
Remove a user's access to your account. You can deny any user access to your account. For example, if an employee has left your firm, you don’t need to remove her from every application in your account. Just cut her off from all of them in one fell swoop by denying access to your account.
If you want, you can register your email domain with QuickBase. Registering
your company's email domain allows you to find QuickBase users in your
company more quickly. And, if you register your domain, you can grant
create application permissions to everyone in your company. Learn
more about registering your email domain with QuickBase.
To ask QuickBase to recognize your email domain, click the Summary tab.
Within the Company Info section, click the name of your company. On the
left side of the page that appears, click the Edit email Domains
link. Type your domain name in the box that appears and click the Send
Request to an Application Specialist button.
The Groups tab is probably one you'll want to return to later, when you have a better idea of who'll be accessing applications in your account and how you want to grant them access. A group is a collection of registered QuickBase users to which you give a name. Any user who has the power to create an application, can create a group.
Groups can help you manage your account or application very efficiently. When you create a group, you can gather similar users together and grant application access or special permission rights to all members at once. For example, say you frequently share applications with all twenty people in your sales department. Sure, you can share with them one by one, but why not save yourself a lot of time and effort by gathering them all together in a group? That way, you can share an application once with the "sales" group, instead of selecting twenty users and sharing with each one.
An added benefit of groups is that you can use them to control access permissions within an application. Normally, you control permissions by assigning a role to a user. This role determines what the user can see or do. Save yourself loads of time by assigning a role to an entire group. Whatever restrictions come with the role then apply to each member. For example, say you've created an application to manage your bow tie business. Sales needs to know what product line they'll be offering this year, but you don't want them to see next year's top secret, in-progress designs. (Will it be stripes or polka-dots?) You could create a role that controls access in this way and assign it to the "Sales" group. Likewise, you could create a "Design" group for your firm designers and assign this group a role that forbids access to sensitive sales commission information.
If you use groups to control access to your account and applications within it, they can even relieve you of the need to manually remove a user's application access or to deny or deactivate a user. For example, if you've granted a consultant access to your application by adding him to a group, you can remove his access by deleting him from the group. If you're managing groups on the billing account level, this works the same way. Depending upon how you've structured your groups, removing a user from a group might take away his access to all applications in your account, for example. In this situation, you should make sure that no application manager has granted him access as an individual user. To do so, after you remove the user from any and all groups, go the Billing Account page (on your My QuickBase page, click Manage my billing account) and check the Users with Access tab.
Tip: As a Billing Account Administrator, you can assign a new user to a group, even before an application manager grants her access to information. This trick is called "provisioning" and it's a great way to ensure that a user has all the proper permissions in place, before she sees your data. (Read about provisioning users.)
Be careful when adding users
Whether you're provisioning a new user or inviting someone who's never logged into QuickBase to access your application, make sure you type the person's email address correctly. A typo results in a lost invitation and a bogus user account that you can't remove from QuickBase. If you've entered an incorrect email address, create an additional account using the correct email address. Even when you do so, there's a danger that others may mistake the bogus account with the real account (if they're very similar) and your user may miss invitations and alerts. If this confusion occurs, you must contact QuickBase support to resolve it.
If you have a question or need help with your QuickBase application, help is just a click away. From the QuickBase Help menu, you can access:
QuickBase Help. Online help provides information on how to use QuickBase features.
Support Center. Access the support center to find answers to common questions, view instructional videos, or to enter a support case. From the Support Center, you'll find these options:
Knowledge Base contains troubleshooting tips, nifty workarounds and solutions to advanced questions. Many Knowledge Base articles were written by our staff in response to past questions from users.
QuickBase Community Forum. Your problem may have been solved before by another QuickBase customer. Explore the QuickBase Forum where experienced developers and QuickBase staffers share tips and tricks. You can search for a solution or post your problem for discussion.
Video Tutorials. QuickBase training videos cover basic concepts and show you how to select, create and share applications.
And, for more technical questions, you can visit the QuickBase Innovation Network (QIN), a community resource for building and extending QuickBase apps.
If none of these resources deliver the answer you need or you are having a technical problem, use the button on the top right of the Support page to enter a support case. Staffers will respond as soon as possible.
If you select Help > Create a Guide, you can write and post your own custom instructions. Your users can access these guides from the application's Help menu. The menu pictured here shows a guide called How to Add Activities.
End-User Guides - When an application
manager creates custom guide(s) for application users, each one appears
on the Help menu.
You'll notice that the Help menu also includes the following options:
About --application
name--
Click this option to see basic information about
the application, like who the manager is and what account owns the
content.
Application Site Map
This is a handy resource for application managers. It gathers
access to most customization controls on a single page. Read
more.