Your company settings are the foundation everything else sits on. Set them correctly once and timestamps, money figures and report access all behave the way a UK 3PL expects. Get the timezone wrong and a job booked for 8am can read as 8am somewhere else entirely. This guide covers the localisation and access settings worth getting right on day one.
Timezone, and why it matters most
Of all the settings, your company timezone has the widest reach. Job times, dispatch windows, dock slots and the timestamps on receiving and proof of delivery are all interpreted against it. A new company defaults to UTC, which is close to UK time but not the same once clocks change for British Summer Time. A UK operation should set its timezone to Europe/London so that booked times, schedules and reports line up with what people on the floor and in the cab actually see, and so the clocks move with the seasons automatically.
This is not cosmetic. A job planned for an early-morning collection has to mean the same thing to the planner, the driver and the customer. When the timezone is right, the times shown on the Job Planner and on transport jobs and proof of delivery are unambiguous, and your reports total the right things into the right days.
Date, time and number formatting
Alongside the timezone, Loaditude lets you set how dates, times and numbers are displayed:
- Date format: choose a day-first format such as DD/MM/YYYY so a UK team is never left guessing whether 03/04 means March or April.
- Time format: 24-hour or 12-hour. Most UK logistics teams prefer 24-hour, so 16:30 cannot be mistaken for the small hours.
- Locale and number format: the locale tunes how numbers read so figures look familiar to your team.
These are presentation choices, not data changes. The underlying records are the same, you are simply choosing how they are shown, which removes a whole class of avoidable mistakes when staff read a screen at a glance.
Currency and financial defaults
Your company currency sets the money your operation runs in. A new company defaults to USD, so a UK 3PL should change it to GBP before raising any quotes or invoices. Currency flows through pricing and billing, so setting it up front keeps your quotes and rate cards and transport invoicing consistent rather than having to correct figures later.
Settings also hold financial defaults such as your standard payment terms and tax configuration, so new invoices start from sensible values instead of being filled in by hand each time. Set these to match how your business actually trades.
Role-based report access
Not everyone should see every number. Loaditude groups reports into three categories and lets you control which roles can open each one:
- Operational: stock, inbound and outbound, ageing, pallets, jobs and driver utilisation.
- Financial: revenue, value-added-services billing and other money reports.
- Compliance: working-time-directive and other compliance reports.
Out of the box the defaults are conservative and practical. Operational and compliance reports are open to company owners, admins and warehouse managers; financial reports are limited to owners and admins; and warehouse operatives get no report access at all. That means a floor operative will not stumble into your revenue figures, while a manager can still see the operational picture they need to run a shift.
Owners and admins can change this mapping in settings to fit how your business is structured, for example opening compliance reports to a specific role or tightening financial access further. The control is by role rather than by individual, so as people join and leave you only ever manage their role (see accounts, users and passwords), and their report access follows automatically. For what is inside the reports themselves, see warehouse reports and stock analysis and transport reports and analytics.
A sensible setup order
When you first configure a company, a good order is: set the timezone, then date and time formats, then currency and financial defaults, then review report access against your roles. Doing it in that order means every job, quote and report you create afterwards starts from the right baseline, rather than needing correction once real work is flowing.
Where to go next
- Getting started with Loaditude puts these settings in the context of first-week setup.
- Accounts, users and passwords covers the roles that report access is built on.
- Warehouse reports and stock analysis covers the reports those access rules govern.