This page walks you from a brand-new account to a populated household. Five minutes if you have receipts handy, fifteen if you don't.

1. Sign in

Visit app.hdb.io and enter your email. We do not use passwords; we send a magic link and a six-digit code, and either one works to sign in. Magic link is fastest if your email is open on the same device. Code is best if you are signing in on a shared computer.

The link and the code both expire after five minutes. If you miss the window, request a new one. There is no rate-limit penalty.

2. Create your household

After your first sign-in you land on a "create your household" form with two fields: name and slug. The slug becomes part of the public URL for invite links and (eventually) custom subdomains; it has to be unique across the platform.

Pick something memorable. the-stratfords is fine. household-1 is also fine. You can change the name later, but not the slug.

3. Invite the people who live there

Open the household settings and add the other members of your household. For each one, choose:

• Role. Owner, adult, child, or guest. Owners can change everything. Adults can do almost everything but can't remove other adults. Children see chores, pocket money, and a curated subset of modules. Guests see nothing by default until you grant per-module access.
• Login or person-only. A "person record" is a member without a login. Useful for kids, lodgers, or anyone who shouldn't have full app access but should still appear in chores, calendars, and pocket-money tallies. You can promote a person to a login later by attaching a user account.

4. Add the first dozen items

The fastest way to value is to dump in a dozen items you would actually want to find later: the dishwasher, the heat pump, the laptop you bought last year, the lawnmower, the printer. Each item gets a name, a location, and an optional photo, serial number, and warranty window. Everything else is optional.

Don't worry about completeness. The platform is built to compound: you add five items today, three more next week, your partner adds four next weekend, and after a month the inventory becomes useful without anyone having "done the spreadsheet."

5. File your first receipt

Open the receipts module and either upload a photo from your phone or forward a PDF receipt from your email. The receipt sits in an inbox until you tag it (vendor, item, category). The OCR worker is scaffolded but currently no-op; you'll fill in the fields yourself for now. The receipt is linked to whichever items you select, so it shows up on the item's history page.

What's next

That's the basics. From here the natural next steps are:

• Households and roles: the full breakdown of what each role can and can't do, plus how multi-household membership works.
• Data export: what comes out, in what format, on what trigger.