Setting Up

Before starting to use Venture Tracker, there are a few administrative tasks to tailor the installation to your program. These include:

A few variables will be set by the VT team (at Parkview). These include:

• Email contact - for the person in your team who will deal with queries
• Main user - the person who will be set up as the first manager level user in your team. This person will be able to subsequently add all other users (see User Classes and Adding Users)
• subdomain name - all Venture Tracker companny users are <subdomain>.venturetracker.net. This needs to be set up right at the start of the installation process.
• system or program name - the ’name’ of the sender of emails

Your contact in the VT team will help you set these up.

Defining the types or categories of companies that you wish to track. For example:

• Pre-Inc, Startup, Growth, Scaleup. OR
• Launch, Accelerate, Grow. OR
• Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3. OR
• Applicant, Member, Alumni, Historic Member

You may well have your own definitions here. These should be defined in the Company Types table. Once they have been set, they can be edited. CAUTION! Whenever you are making global changes, there are consequences to reporting and unintended issues can arise. Contact the VT team if you are unsure.

You can define the types of meetings you wish to keep records of in Meeting Types. When you have a meeting with a company or venture, you can write up your meeting notes in a 'Log'. Optionally you can categorise the type of meeting, e.g. Mentor Meeting, Program Review Meeting, Exit Interview etc. Defining these can be very useful to understand the level of engagement with your program for each company.

These are used throughout VT to track activities that may change status over time. For example, and event may have statuses such as Planning, Scheduled, Complete, Cancelled etc. An introduction between a company and an investor could have statuses such as Introduced, Engaged, Invested, Rejected etc.

These status types are under your control, and you can define as many as your program needs. In many cases, these are used to populate a dropdown list on an edit form. In those cases, a category field allows you to specifiy which status types are used in which dropdown. Allowable values are:

• BRP - used in Panels
• Huddle - used in Huddles
• Funding - used in Investment Introductions
• Introduction - used in Customer Introductions

Additionally, there is a field called sort_order. This is used to determine the order that values will be displayed in a dropdown list, and is 'lowest first'.

The 'display_class' field is not currently used.

Dropdowns are very similar to Status Types above, but are also used in events - user defined data entry - as well as at other points throughout VT.

More information will be provided on Dropdowns soon.

You can edit a set of templates to be used by Venture Tracker when it sends emails to various parties.

There are certain features which are usually disabled upon first installation, to keep the onboarding process simple. However, they may be enabled depending upon need - please discuss with the Venture Tracker team. These include features such as:

• No difference between mentors and other externals.
• Enable huddles - events where you can invite multiple companies and multiple external people
• Enable users and/or external people to submit notes to VT via email