Onboarding & industry setup

When you pick your industry during signup, Meridian seeds your workspace from an industry template — not a blank slate. The template provides a starter color palette, service catalog entries, custom field definitions, job workflow stages, and terminology appropriate for your trade.

For example, an HVAC workspace starts with equipment and refrigerant fields on jobs, stages like “Diagnosed” and “Parts ordered” in the job workflow, and service items like “Preventive maintenance visit.” A landscaping workspace starts with different defaults.

You can change all of this after signup — the seeds are a starting point, not a constraint.

Your brand color is initialized from your industry template, not from Meridian’s gold. During the onboarding customize step you can preview and change it; if you continue without changing it, the template default is kept. The color appears on your public site, your customer emails, and your invoices and quotes.

During onboarding you can enter a public phone number and public email address. These appear on your booking site and customer-facing documents. You can update them later under Settings → Branding.

The industry template fills in structure (fields, stages, services) — not content you’d need to verify, like prices or legal text. Prices on service items start empty. Terms and legal copy are blank until you write them.

Custom fields seeded from the template appear in Settings → Custom fields exactly as if you had created them yourself. Job workflow stages appear in Settings → Workflows. Both are fully editable.

Once you’re past the setup flow your workspace is ready to use. Settings → Customize is where you go to refine branding, terminology, custom fields, workflows, templates, and automations as your needs evolve.

If you’re moving to Meridian from another system, or your handover has a few loose ends (an account transfer, a service you need to confirm you’re keeping), the Meridian team can hand you a short checklist that shows up on your dashboard — separate from the industry-template setup above. Each task has plain-language details and, once decided, a due date; a task marked “Do this together with us” means the team will work it through with you rather than leaving it fully self-serve.

Only your workspace owner/admin see this card, and only while there’s an active task — mark one done and the team is notified right away.