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Getting started with Halvard

Most accounts go from sign-up to a working Monday dashboard in about 20 minutes. This page walks through the five things you will do in the first week.

Connecting a tool

Open Settings → Connections and pick the kind of tool. For shops, tills, payment processors and accounting software you sign in to the tool and approve read-only access. For booking tools and your own systems, Halvard gives you a webhook address to paste in.

New connections backfill the last 13 months on Team (5 years on Business) so your charts have history on day one. Backfill usually finishes within an hour; the dashboard fills in as it goes.

• Connect the tool that takes the money first — shop or till. Everything else hangs off orders.
• Payments next, so revenue is shown after fees and refunds.
• Stock and shipping last. They matter most once you are reading the dashboard weekly.

Metric definitions

Every number on every dashboard reads one definition, written in plain words. The defaults are sensible; change them in Settings → Metrics if your business counts differently. A typical definition:

Net revenue: payments captured in UK time, less refunds on the day they are issued, less processor fees, excluding VAT.

Changing a definition updates every chart, alert and digest at once, and the change is recorded with your name and the date.

Alerts

Pick a metric, pick who hears about it, and accept or edit the suggested range. Suggestions come from the same weekday and hour over your last eight weeks, so a quiet Monday is compared with other Mondays.

• Wait for two readings. Most rules should hold for two checks in a row before firing.
• Send it to the owner. A chat channel, an inbox or a mobile number — not everyone.
• Start with four. Stock cover, refunds, a silent till, first reply time.

Sharing and seats

Seats are for people who edit dashboards and alerts: 2 on Free, 10 on Team, 50 on Business. Everyone else can have a read-only link. Links can expire on a date, hide revenue figures, or show one site only, and they never use a seat.

The Monday digest goes to every seat by default. Anyone can add their own email address to it from a share link.

Sending events by API

If a system can make an HTTPS request, it can send events. Create a workspace key in Settings → API and post JSON to the ingest address. Each request counts as one event.

curl https://ingest.halvard.example/v1/events \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $HALVARD_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "order.placed",
    "occurred_at": "2026-09-21T10:42:00Z",
    "value": 64.50,
    "currency": "GBP",
    "site": "mill-road",
    "properties": { "channel": "online", "items": 3 }
  }'

Events are accepted in batches of up to 500. Anything with the same type becomes a metric you can chart, sum or alert on. Rate limit: 50 requests a second per workspace.