Down the left of the screen is the menu. It is organised into groups named for areas of work — Sales Management, Procurement Management, Inventory Management, Accounts Management, and so on — with a few standing items above and below them: Dashboard, Dashboards and Documents near the top; User Management and System Setup near the bottom.
Three habits will make the menu feel small:
- Groups start closed. Click a group to open it, and it shows its screens in the order work flows — for most modules, its cockpit first, then the day-to-day documents, then the statements and reports. You only ever see the groups for modules your company has switched on, and only the screens your role allows (see 1.12).
- Inside a module, the same screens appear as tabs across the top of the page. The sidebar and the tab strip are two views of one list, so you can navigate by whichever is in front of you.
- The order is deliberate. Within a group, items follow the workflow. System Setup is the standing exception to the tabs habit: it has a single menu entry, which opens a directory of every setup screen grouped by area (16.3) — setup is a place you visit on purpose, not a list you scroll past.
Figure 1.1 — The menu. Drawing to be produced after the UI/UX pass: the sidebar with its groups named, one group opened to show the cockpit-first order, and the matching tab strip inside a module page.
If a screen you were told about is not in the menu, the cause is almost always one of three things, in this order: its module is switched off, your role does not include it, or — for order and delivery documents — your company's workflow depth is Simple (see 0.5).