Your First Location

What a "location" means in Nabu, why it matters, and what to expect as you complete your first setup.

What is a "location"?

In Nabu, a location represents one physical clinic or business. If you run a single medspa, you have one location. If you have clinics in three different cities, you'd have three locations — each with its own data, costs, providers, and financial reports.

Every piece of your financial data in Nabu is tied to a specific location. This means:

Your providers belong to a location
Your services and pricing live at the location level
Your revenue, costs, and margins are calculated per location
Reports are scoped to the location you're viewing

The location you select at the top of the dashboard controls what data you see.

The Start Guide

After onboarding, Nabu shows you the Start Guide — a checklist of all the setup tasks you need to complete before your financial numbers are accurate. You'll see it in the left sidebar as "Start Guide" with a badge showing how many items are left.

The Start Guide doesn't have to be completed all at once. You can work through it section by section, and the badge updates automatically as you complete each section.

Once all sections are confirmed, the Start Guide disappears from the sidebar — that's your signal that setup is complete.

The Setup sections

The Setup area (accessible from the sidebar) is where you fill in all the business-specific information Nabu needs to calculate real financial data. Think of it as the settings that make your numbers yours.

Here's what each section does at a glance:

Section	What you're providing
Business Costs	Rent, utilities, insurance, software subscriptions, and other fixed monthly expenses
Business Targets	Monthly revenue goals and profit targets
People & Payroll	Provider names, email addresses, pay types, rates, commission structures, and productive hours
Products & Supplies	Consumables and supplies used per service (needles, serums, etc.)
Equipment	Devices like lasers, hydrafacial machines — their cost and allocation
Allocation Rules	How fixed overhead is allocated into services and capacity
Payment & Financing Fees	Manual card, ACH, cash, and financing fee rules
Marketing Costs	Ad spend, referrals, events, campaigns, and other acquisition costs
Services	Your full service menu with pricing, duration, and what labor/supplies go into each
Membership Plans	The membership subscriptions you sell
Packages	Prepaid packages of services
Clients	Client profiles that visits, credits, memberships, packages, and payments attach to
Sales & Visit History	Historical visits, invoices, payments, redemptions, memberships, packages, and gift card activity

Each of these is covered in depth in the Setup Guide.

What order should I complete setup in?

Nabu works even with partial setup, but for the most accurate numbers, complete the sections in this order:

Business Costs — your fixed overhead is the foundation of all cost calculations
Business Targets — set the goals Nabu compares against
People & Payroll — provider compensation rules are required to calculate labor cost per service
Products & Supplies — optional but improves service-level costing
Equipment — optional but improves service-level costing
Allocation Rules — decide how overhead flows into services
Payment & Financing Fees — enter manual processor and financing fee rules before importing payments
Marketing Costs — add acquisition spend and campaign context
Services — service pricing and duration are needed for profitability calculations
Membership Plans — needed if you sell memberships
Packages — needed if you sell prepaid packages
Clients — import your client list; gift cards, credits, memberships, packages, and visits attach here when activity exists
Sales & Visit History — import historical sales data last because it references everything above

What does "confirming" a setup section mean?

At the bottom of each setup section, there's a "Mark as reviewed" or "Confirm" button. This tells Nabu that you've reviewed the data and it's ready to use in calculations.

You don't have to have perfect data to confirm — just make sure the information is reasonable and you're done entering what you have for now. You can always come back and update things.

Confirming a section:

Removes it from the Start Guide checklist
Signals to Nabu that the data is ready to use
Doesn't lock anything — you can still edit after confirming

What if I don't have all the information?

That's completely normal. Here's a practical approach:

For compensation: Use your best estimate for pay type, rate, commission, and productive hours. Even a rough number is better than leaving it blank. You can update it anytime.
For service costs: Start with just service names and pricing. Add consumable and equipment costs later when you have the details.
For historical data: Import whatever you have. Even 3 months of history gives you useful baseline numbers.

Nabu is designed to improve incrementally. The more accurate your setup, the more accurate your reports — but you don't need perfection to start getting value.

Ready to set up?

Start with the first section:

Setup Guide: Overview →