Sample · Part I · Section 1 · Before you click

Before you begin

Most businesses create an account first and think afterwards about who may use it. That is the wrong order, and you only notice when the first file ends up in the wrong place. Four decisions belong beforehand. Together they take twenty minutes and save you the clean-up.

1.1 Who may use it?

Not “everyone” and not “just me, let's see”. Write down two or three positions: the office manager and me. The reason is practical: every further access is one more place where something can get in that does not belong — and one more person you have to see off when they leave.

This decision determines the kind of account, and it does so already here. An individual plan is an account for exactly one person: for the individual plans the provider lists project sharing and collaboration, central billing and administration and role-based access as No. A business account starts at two people. So anyone who wants to work as a pair does not choose between “an account” and “a bigger account”, but between two separate individual accounts without shared administration and a business account. Section 2 sets this out.

Whoever starts small can expand. Whoever starts wide has to gather everything back in.

1.2 What for?

Two or three concrete tasks, not a wish list. Prepare quotation texts. Summarise long enquiries. Turn minutes into tasks.

That is not bureaucracy; it is the yardstick by which you measure in three months whether it was worth it. Without it, only a feeling remains. Volume 1 describes in section 6 a four-week approach — decide, apply, evaluate — that begins with exactly this list.

1.3 With which data?

This is where it gets serious, and where this guide stops being an operating manual. What may go into an AI tool and what may not is not decided at the interface but by your business and by what applies to you.

What to consider is in Volume 1, section 12.3 — where data leakage through inputs is described as a risk — and in section 2.4, which lists the contractual points to check: data processing agreement, place of processing, training with business data, liability for third-party rights.

For the start, one single line you draw for yourself is enough: What you would not send to an external service provider without a contract does not go in here either. Section 6 of this guide turns that into a list.

1.4 Who tidies up?

One person, named by position. Once a month, this person checks who has access, what is in the projects, and whether what was decided three months ago still holds. In a one-person business that is you — so put an appointment in your calendar, or it will not happen.

Section 8 says what this person looks at.

This section deliberately has no screenshot. Anyone who sees screenshots here starts clicking instead of deciding.