Trellis walks you through everything you need to get your workspace running, from the moment you sign up to the point where you've got your first project on the board. Nothing here is set in stone — you can always skip a step and come back to it, and Trellis keeps a running checklist of what's still outstanding.
1. Sign up
Head to trellisapp.co.uk and select Get started. You can create an account with:
- Email and password
- Google (single sign-on)
- Microsoft (single sign-on)
You'll be asked for your name, email, and password (or you'll pass through Google/Microsoft's consent screen instead). Trellis is available to users aged 18 and over, so you'll set a date of birth here too.
Verify your email if prompted, then you're in.
2. Tell us about yourself
Trellis walks you through a quick three-part personal setup before you land inside a workspace.
- Profile picture and name — upload a photo and enter your first and last name so teammates recognise you across the product. Required.
- Date of birth and contact details — optional. Add your DOB and address, postcode, country, city, and phone if you want your admin to have them for HR and compliance records. Skip for now if you'd rather add them later from your profile settings.
- Two-factor authentication — required. Trellis makes 2FA mandatory for every account. Pick from an email code (sent to your inbox), an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, 1Password, and similar), or a passkey (Face ID, fingerprint, or device PIN). You can add more methods later from Personal settings → Security & Authentication.
You can update anything you skipped from your profile settings once you're inside the workspace.
3. Create a workspace or accept an invite
If someone at your company has already set up a workspace and invited you, you'll land straight inside it after signup. Just accept the invite from your email and you're done — skip ahead to step 5.
Otherwise, you'll be asked to create a workspace. Trellis takes you through this in two short steps.
Workspace details. Give it a name (your company or team name, usually) and a handle. The handle becomes part of your Trellis URL and can't be changed later, so pick something you're happy with.
Choose your feature areas. Pick which of the three feature areas you want turned on:
- Project management — the core delivery toolkit. Almost every workspace wants this on.
- HR — leave and absence tracking. Enterprise-only, and can be turned on later once you're on the right plan.
- CRM — contact and organisation management. Enterprise-only, and can be turned on later once you're on the right plan.
You can change any of this later in Settings → Workspace → General, so don't overthink it.
4. Land in your workspace
You'll arrive on the Dashboard. If you're the person who created the workspace, you become its Owner automatically — the role with full control. Everyone else you invite from here comes in with the role you assign.
Along the left is the sidebar, with everything the workspace can do. Along the top-right is the user menu (your profile, notifications, security), and top-left is the workspace switcher for jumping between workspaces you belong to.
5. Follow the onboarding checklist
Every new workspace opens with an onboarding panel on the dashboard, showing you exactly what still needs setting up. The checklist reshapes itself based on your role: Owners and Admins see the workspace-wide setup items, everyone else sees the personal ones.
If you're an Owner or Admin
Your checklist is split into three groups.
HR setup
- Set your workspace work schedule and calendar year (working days, working hours, leave year start). This underpins timesheets, resourcing capacity, and leave calculations.
- Add your colleagues by inviting them from Settings → Workspace → Members. Pick their workspace role as you invite them.
- Add contract start dates for your team so pro-rata leave calculations work correctly.
Project management setup
- Create rate cards for each role you distinguish (Senior Designer, Junior Developer, and so on). Rate cards feed pricing, resourcing costs, and profitability.
- Add salaries to each member, alongside their rate card. This is what unlocks the £ figures across resourcing, allocation, and profitability reports.
- Add packages if you use reusable bundles of work in your quotes. Optional but useful if your quoting is repeatable.
Explore integrations
- Have a look at what plugs into Trellis (Google, Microsoft, Xero, and others) so your data flows without manual entry. See Integrations.
For everyone (including admins)
One-minute setup
- Fill in your personal information so teammates can identify you and admins can reach you if needed.
- Review your notifications so Trellis pings you about the things that matter and stays quiet about the rest.
Try your first project
Once the workspace basics are in, create your first project from Projects → All Projects → New project. Give it a name, a code, a budget, and add the team.
Complete your tutorial
Trellis includes a short in-product tour that walks you through the sidebar, the dashboard widgets, and how to move between projects. Best done once you've got a project in place so the tour has real content to point at.
6. Start running the project
Once your first project exists, the natural next steps are:
- Planning — add deliverables and assign hours to each team member for each one.
- Resourcing — lay those planned hours out on the calendar so you can see who's working on what and when.
- Tasks and Board — break work down and move it through your workflow as your team delivers.
- Timesheet — everyone on the team logs the hours they actually work.
Trellis is fully set up at this point. Everything else in the sidebar (Sprints, Roadmap, Timeline, Notes, CRM, Integrations, AI) is optional and can be adopted at whatever pace suits your team.
Where to go next
- PM philosophy if you want the thinking behind how Trellis expects a project to flow from proposal to delivery.
- Or click into any specific feature you need — the sidebar is your table of contents.