Starting with a new application can mean working out two things at once: how it works, and where to begin. With property finances, it can also feel as though you need to enter every property, payment and expense before you get anything useful back.

The latest addition to CLARIFYProperty is a series of onboarding tips: short, practical emails to help you through those first steps, with useful guidance at a point when you can put it into practice.

The starting point is deliberately manageable. Add one property and its expected rent, then its largest regular outgoing. That gives you the beginnings of a forecast and a useful question to explore: what should this property’s cashflow look like over the coming months? You can build out the detail as you go.

The guidance takes account of what you have already done. If you have not added a property, an early email helps you start there. If you have a property but no expected rent, the suggestion moves on to a Rent Smart Schedule. Once you have both income and outgoings in your forecast, prompts for those initial setup steps can be skipped.

That means less time wondering what to do next or reading instructions for something you have already completed. Emails include a link to the relevant area of the application, such as the property’s Smart Schedules or the bank account whose transactions you need to review.

As your setup develops, the guidance helps you connect your forecast with real activity. Importing a couple of recent months of bank transactions is a manageable place to start. From there, the emails explain how to identify rent receipts and handle payments where a letting agent has deducted fees or maintenance.

That distinction matters. If an agent collects £1,000 in rent and pays you £850 after deductions, comparing the £850 bank receipt with £1,000 of expected rent would give a misleading picture. Separating gross rent from the costs helps Rent Performance make a useful comparison. When expected rent and categorised rental income overlap for the same property in a calendar month, the guidance points you towards reviewing them together. If something is missing, it helps you find the next step needed to get there.

There is also help with making ongoing work easier. Categorisation rules can reduce repeated effort for predictable transactions. Later guidance introduces ways to look further ahead: checking the coming year’s forecast for cash pressure, testing a change with Smart Scenarios, and reviewing the combined picture in Portfolio Control. These suggestions depend on your setup and access, so they build on information you can actually use.

The emails are spaced out, and setup guidance shares a daily sending limit with routine account reminders. The application checks whether a message is still relevant before sending it, and old setup prompts expire rather than building up into a backlog. Essential account messages, such as subscription confirmation, can still arrive separately.

You stay in control of the optional guidance. You can choose whether to receive setup help, tips and trial offers, and unsubscribe through an email or change the setting in Preferences. Essential account-access and billing emails remain separate, so switching off tips does not switch off those notices.

A free trial gives you time to explore. This guidance is there to help you use that time well: build something useful early, understand what the numbers are telling you, and discover the next feature when you have a reason to use it.

From a development perspective, these onboarding tips also establish a reusable messaging pattern. Each new message can define when it is useful, when it becomes out of date and where it should take you, while sharing the existing delivery checks, frequency limits and email preferences. In future, that could support a reminder to review a forecast that has not been updated for a while, or a short introduction to a new reporting feature when your portfolio has enough information to make it useful. Those are possible extensions, built on the same approach of making guidance relevant to what you are doing.