When you first onboard, Ceum seeds your workspace from a starter template — a ready-made set of statuses, task types, relationship types, email templates, and default settings so you're productive without configuring everything by hand. You choose your template on the Template step of Onboarding, just after the Settings step.
The templates
There are two templates today. Every new account starts on Freelancer unless you switch.
- Freelancer (default) — a client pipeline, billable task types, and a full invoice flow. The standard solo-consultant setup.
- Developer — feature / task / bug / subtask types and a code-review → QA → done task flow, for ticket-driven product work.
What a template seeds
Choosing a template fills in your initial configuration across the app:
- Statuses for clients, projects, tasks, and invoices — see Custom statuses.
- Task types with their billable / standalone / embeddable flags — see Task types.
- Relationship types for project-to-project and task-to-task links — see Relationship types.
- Email templates for the messages Ceum can send.
- Default settings — currency, decimals, timezone, date format, and tax rate.
The two templates differ mainly in their task workflow and types: Freelancer leans on billing (a Billable type and an invoice-oriented status set, plus an overdue-reminder email), while Developer swaps in Feature / Task / Bug types and a Backlog → Todo → In Progress → Code Review → QA → Done task flow. Both seed the same kinds of records — only the contents differ.
Applying a template
On the Template step you preview each template, then commit:
- Confirm applies the selected template.
- Skip applies Freelancer as-is.
Either way, your chosen template is remembered on your account (so later defaults follow it). You don't edit the individual items on the onboarding step itself — everything a template creates becomes ordinary configuration you can rename, reorder, or delete afterwards from Settings.
Switching templates later
The onboarding picker runs once, but you can switch templates any time from Settings → Template (/settings/template) — pick the other template, or re-apply the current one.
Switching reconciles your configuration toward the template: it adds and updates the template's items and removes seeded ones you no longer have — but it won't delete a status or type that's still in use. If something can't be removed cleanly, Ceum surfaces it as a conflict so you can reassign the affected records first, rather than silently breaking them.
Tips and edge cases
- Freelancer is the fallback. Brand-new accounts and skipped pickers land on Freelancer.
- Seeding isn't destructive on first run. The initial pre-seed adds the template's items without wiping anything you may already have.
- You're never locked in. Everything a template creates is ordinary configuration you can edit, reorder, or delete afterwards from Settings.
On mobile
- The same template step runs in mobile onboarding — pick Freelancer or Developer (or skip to Freelancer) and the same statuses and task types are seeded.
- Switch templates from the web app. The mobile onboarding has no conflict resolver, so switching templates after onboarding is done from Settings → Template on the web.