Questions
The things people ask before they spend anything.
Common questions about the business management platform, websites, domain names and business email. Every answer here is one somebody has actually asked us on the phone, written the way it was answered then — including the parts where the answer is no.
Everything on this page
Find the one you came with
Sorted by what the question is about rather than by how often it is asked. Any of them opens where it stands.
The platform
What it covers, what it does with your records, and who in your office may see them.
- How is this different from using a separate app for each function?
- Do I need a separate login or organisation for each part?
- Do I have to take all of it?
- Can I bring across the lists I already keep in a spreadsheet?
- What does the phone app actually do?
- We run more than one branch — is that actually handled?
- Can I decide what each person is allowed to see?
- Is my data mixed in with other businesses?
Websites
Standing on their own, joining the rest later, and who fixes one when it breaks.
Names
Bringing one across, what happens if the date goes past, and whose name it actually is.
Mailboxes on your own name, what the name needs first, and where you read them.
Before you buy
What decides a price, seeing it work on your own paperwork, and what leaving looks like.
Who we are
Who you would be dealing with, and how much of this we actually built.
The question under all of them
How is this different from using a separate app for each function?
When each job has its own program, each one keeps its own records. The customer in the sales program is not the customer in the billing program; the staff member in attendance is not the staff member in payroll. You end up setting up an account in each, typing the same people in twice, and buying something extra to keep the copies in step. Here there is one business and one customer list — a customer is a single record that sales, billing, your website and the phone all read.
- One customer list.
- One employee list.
- One catalogue.
The platform
What it covers, and who may see it
KaryalayOne is the office in software: what you sell, what you hold, what you are owed and the people who do the work, all reading the same records.
No. One business, one login, one set of people, and roles set part by part in the same place. Switching a part on adds a section to the same system rather than signing you up to another product with its own setup to do.
No. Take the sets you need — the people and the payroll with none of the selling, say. The one that leans on others is Finance: its bills are for customers from Sales and items from Operations. Anything switched off is hidden from the menu and simply will not open, however you try to reach it — so a part you do not use is genuinely not there, rather than sitting greyed out in your way.
Your customer list and your stock, yes — brought in as they are rather than typed in again, so the first week is not spent copying. What arrives is a proper record from that moment: the customer you brought in is the same customer the next quotation, the next bill and your website are all working from, and the items you brought in are what the next quotation is priced from.
It is where records are made, not a dashboard. It saves call logs and call recordings from the phone onto the customer they were about, and carries WhatsApp Business — chats, bulk messages, saved replies and auto-replies — in the same app and against the same records. Staff use it for their own attendance, payslips and expense claims too.
Yes, and not as a setting bolted on later. Which branch a record belongs to is enforced deep inside the system; each branch carries its own address, branding and legal details; stock is held per warehouse with transfers between them; and a website’s key belongs to one branch rather than to all of them.
Yes, and it is not one all-or-nothing key. What a person may open follows the roles they hold, set part by part; for leads, attendance and expense claims somebody can be kept to their own; and where you run more than one branch somebody can be held to the branches they work in. Alongside that the owner can read back who changed a customer, a quotation, a bill or an order, which is worth having on the day somebody is certain they never touched it.
No. KaryalayOne runs on your own copy of the software, with its own private database and its own login details. Another business’s records cannot appear in yours by mistake, because they are not stored in the same place at all.
Websites
A site that stands on its own
A customer who wants a website and nothing else is a customer, not somebody to be worked on later. It joins the rest of the office on the day that becomes useful, and not before.
Yes, and that is a normal way to start. The Websites line stands on its own — pages, enquiry forms, a presence, and the name you trade under. Join it to the rest on the day that becomes useful, and the enquiries it has been collecting start landing in your enquiry list instead of your email.
Either. A website connects using a key you issue and can take back, limited to one branch and to what you leave switched on — branch details, catalogue, stock, customers, quotations, invoices, payments, orders, projects, enquiry forms and online orders are each allowed or withheld on their own. We build sites that use it, but the door is open to whatever you already have.
It is never allowed to decide the price. When a sale comes in, every line is checked against your own price list before an order is created, and the buyer is matched to your records or added at the same moment. An out-of-date page, an old saved cart or an altered link cannot produce an order at a price you did not set.
We do, and there is no argument first about whose part it was. A site assembled out of other people’s add-ons has as many owners as it has parts, each with its own author, its own updates and its own renewal date — and when one of those authors changes something or walks away, the site breaks and it becomes the owner’s problem. The parts your site is made of are not separate products with separate owners, so there is one place to bring it.
Either. The pages, the words and the pictures are yours to edit, and nothing you do is public until somebody publishes — an edit left half-finished on a Tuesday afternoon is never what a customer arrives at. A page can also be sent to you as a plain link that needs no account and no password, so you read it the way a visitor would before anything goes live. And on the days you would rather we simply did it, ask.
Names
The name above the door
We keep names so we are not the shop that sends you somewhere else for one. It is the thinnest part of what we do and the one that stops everything when it lapses.
Yes, and most of it is us waiting rather than you working. You turn off the lock wherever the name is now and ask them for the code that authorises a move; we put the request in and keep telling you where it has got to. Two things are worth knowing before you start. A name cannot move at all until about two months have passed since it was registered or last moved — that is the ending’s rule, not ours. And we will not name an hour it will be finished by, because the far end is not ours to promise and a date we invented would be worse than none. Moving where a name is registered is not the same as moving where it points, so the site and the mail carry on through it.
A name is held for a term rather than bought outright, and when the term ends it simply stops: the site goes dark and the mail stops arriving, usually on the same morning and usually before anybody has worked out why. For a while afterwards it is still yours to take back at the ordinary price. After that there is a window in which the people who run the ending will still give it back, at a fee many times what renewing would have cost. Left longer than that, the name goes back on the open market and anybody may take it — the one thing here that no amount of money undoes. Which is why the date matters more than the price, and why a name is worth holding somewhere that will tell you it is coming.
No, and we would say so even if it cost us the sale — names are here so we are not the shop that sends you somewhere else for one, not because they are where we make our living. It is simpler if the name sits with us: the settings your site and your mailboxes need get written for you rather than handed over as a list to paste into a box you have never opened. Bring a name from elsewhere and everything still works; there is just a step where somebody has to point it at us.
It is registered in your own details, not ours. The lock that stops anybody starting to move it is on, and the code that would move it away is shown to you whenever you ask and never withheld — we keep a note of when it was shown, and that note is there to protect you rather than us. Being able to leave without asking anyone’s permission is the only test of that claim worth anything.
Mail on your own address
The address on your invoices and your visiting card should not end in somebody else’s. Mail needs a name to arrive at, and that is the only thing it needs.
Yes. Mailboxes stand on their own the way a website does, and a business that buys nothing from us but its mail is a customer rather than somebody to be worked on later. The one thing mail does need is a name for it to arrive at — either one registered here, or one you already own and keep where it is.
A few settings have to be written against the name, so the rest of the world knows where your mail comes from and where it should be delivered. Where the name is with us, we write them and you never see them. Where it is registered elsewhere, we issue exactly what needs adding and then wait until it can actually be seen before opening anything — which feels slow on the day, and is the difference between mail arriving and mail landing in other people’s spam, found out a fortnight later from a customer who says they never heard back.
No. It opens in a browser if that suits you, and it works with the mail app already on the phone in your pocket — for which you make a separate password that opens the mailbox and nothing else, so taking it back when a phone is lost disturbs nothing. Rules that file mail as it arrives, an out-of-office reply with dates on it, a copy sent to another address and a list of everywhere you are signed in are all yours to set, without asking anybody.
Before you buy
The practical ones, answered straight
What decides a figure, how to see the thing working on your own paperwork, what happens when you write to us, and what leaving looks like.
What does it cost?
Every figure is published, and none of the four lines is priced the same way — which is the useful half of the answer. The platform is four sets and you pay by the person, by the month, buying three months at a time or longer. A website is bought by the year, as a subscription rather than a project you commission, so there is no build fee at the start and no invoice for asking to have something changed afterwards. A name is charged for the term it is held for, and most of that figure belongs to whoever runs its ending rather than to us. And mail is three things: mailboxes by the mailbox, blocks of sending bought ahead for your own software, and campaign sending charged by how many people are on your list.
Can I see it working before I decide?
Yes, and on your own work rather than on a demonstration built to look good. We set up a copy with the parts that look like they fit switched on, and stay on the call while you put a week of your own paperwork through it — with somebody who can answer for the whole system rather than for one part of it.
What actually happens when I get in touch?
It reaches a person here rather than a queue that answers itself. Tell us what the business does, and we come back with which parts to switch on, whether a website belongs in it, and what the system deliberately will not do — that last one being the part most worth having before you spend anything. A way of reaching you back is the only thing we insist on, and whether that is an address or a number is yours: somebody who wants a phone call should not have to invent an email address to ask for one.
What if I switch something off, or want to leave?
Nothing here is sold as an all-or-nothing bundle, so a set your office has stopped running on is a set you do not renew. A term is bought at the start and runs to its date, and what a change in the middle of one does to the money is being settled rather than guessed at here. A name registered with us can be moved away whenever you like, and the code that moves it is yours for the asking. We would rather be somewhere you stay because leaving is easy than somewhere you stay because it is not.
Ask us the one that is not here.
There is no wrong question at this stage, and the awkward ones are the useful ones — what it will not do, what we have not finished, what happens on the day something breaks. Tell us what the business does and we will answer in the same plain terms these are written in.