Your first login:
business profile, locations, currency.

Signing up to nouz lands you in a short setup flow that exists for one reason: every screen in the rest of the app needs to know which shop you're looking at and in what currency. The first few minutes are spent answering exactly that — and then you're done with setup for the next year.

There are three things to set on day one — your business profile, your first location, and your currency and tax. None of these are permanent decisions. All of them can be changed later from Settings. But getting them right now means the rest of the app reads the way you expect, your first revenue entry doesn't need to be corrected, and your accountant won't see foreign-currency surprises in your monthly export.

01 What should I have ready before I log in?

Nothing mandatory — you can finish setup from memory in about three minutes. Two things make it faster, and both are listed below: your shop's street address, which becomes the default location name and sets your country (and with it the default VAT rate for new products), and your local VAT or sales-tax rate, which we pre-fill from your country anyway. No documents, no logins, no accountant on the phone.

• Your shop's street address. Used as the default location name (you can change it). The country is what we actually care about — it sets the default VAT rate for new products.
• Your local VAT or sales tax percentage. 20% for Austria, 19% for Germany, 21% for the Netherlands, etc. We pre-fill from your country, but worth knowing what to expect.

02 What goes in my business profile?

Your business is the umbrella above your locations. One business, one Stripe subscription, one set of teammates. If you run two cafés on different streets, they're two locations under one business — not two businesses. The "business" is the legal entity (or the brand) that runs them.

Three fields:

• Business name. Whatever's on your invoices. You can use a brand name; we don't need the legal entity for nouz. This shows up in the Home tab header, every email we send, and on every Stripe invoice.
• Country. Sets the default VAT rate, the date format, and the number format. You can override per-location if you operate cross-border (rare but supported).
• Display language. English or German today. Picks up everywhere — tabs, buttons, errors, emails. Switch any time from Settings if you change your mind.

03 How do I set up my first location?

A location in nouz is one shop with one P&L. Every revenue entry, every expense, every fixed cost belongs to a location. The header on Home, Revenue, Expenses, and the rest always shows which location you're looking at — and one location's data never bleeds into another's.

In the database, every row carries a location_id. Server-side middleware enforces it on every read and write — there's no way to accidentally see another location's data, even if you tried to forge the request.

1. 1
   Name your location

   Use a name your staff will recognise — street name beats brand name. "Praterstraße 21" is more useful than "Shop 2" when you have multiple locations.

2. 2
   Pick the country

   Sets the default VAT rate for the next step. If you only operate in your home country, the default is right.

3. 3
   Save

   You'll land on Home. The location is now active in the header (top-right picker).

04 How do I set my currency and tax rate?

Currency is set once per business and then shown on every screen — Home, P&L, Revenue, Expenses, Products and Statistics. We default to EUR and the German number format (€1.234,56) for EU businesses, and both are editable from Settings → Business profile. Tax is a default VAT rate on that same profile, used as the suggested value whenever you add a product or a manual revenue row.

Tax is set at two levels:

• Default VAT rate on your business profile — used as the suggested value when you create a new product or a manual revenue row. Set it once to your standard rate (20% Austria, 19% Germany, etc.).
• Per-product tax rate on each product — overrides the default when a product (say, takeaway food) has a different rate. Useful for cafés with split in-house / takeaway rates.

05 What happens after setup?

Once your profile, location, and currency are set, the next move is to log your first day. Open Home, and you'll see a blank today tile waiting for your first revenue entry. The next article (Logging your first day) walks you through that close-out in 90 seconds.

After about a week of logged days, the Statistics tab starts to unlock — day-of-week patterns, peak and weak days, the runway estimate for when this month will pay itself. Until then, Statistics is intentionally quiet (we don't fabricate insights from one day of data). See Your first-week checklist for what to focus on between now and then.