Settings

Settings in Light is a hub, not a long page. It opens on a list of everything you can change, each row showing what it is set to right now — so "am I VAT registered?" and "what is my approval limit?" are answered without opening anything.

Type in the search box to filter, including the settings that live on their own pages elsewhere (people, branches, tax, export). Ctrl+K finds them too: search VAT, logo, password, approval or plan and you land on the page that holds it.

If you are not the owner of the business, most of this is read-only. You can see everything; the owner changes it.

Your sidebar

The Light sidebar can show twenty-five pages, and most businesses use six. A shop with no staff has no use for Pay staff; one with a single branch has none for Locations. Every row you scroll past is a row between you and Reports.

So Your sidebar lets you keep what you use:

• Hide anything you do not need. + puts it back.
• Drag a page up or down to reorder it, or use Move, which works on a phone.
• Just the essentials cuts straight to selling, money, invoices, products, customers and reports.
• Show everything or Back to default undoes the lot.

Two things worth knowing:

• Hiding turns nothing off. A hidden page still works, still records, and is still found by search (Ctrl+K) or by any link to it. It is out of your sidebar, not out of your business.
• Home and Settings cannot be hidden, because Settings is where you put a page back.

The sidebar changes as soon as you save — you do not have to reload or navigate away to see it.

This is yours alone. It follows you between your phone, the till and the laptop, and changes nothing for anybody else in the business.

You

Your name (it goes on invoices and receipts), your phone, your email and your password.

Changing your email takes two steps: type the new one, then enter the six-digit code sent to it. Until you enter the code, nothing has changed.

The business

Everything that goes on what you send out:

• Trading name and, if the certificate says something different, the legal name.
• What the business does — it sets the sensible defaults for categories and reports.
• Phone and WhatsApp number, and whether Kiongozi sends you a morning briefing at 7am.
• TIN and VAT registration — a business can hold a TIN without being VAT registered.
• Your logo, which appears on every invoice, receipt, statement and purchase order.

Where you trade holds the country, the currency your books are kept in, and your time zone. Choosing a country fills in the other two, since that is usually what somebody correcting a mistaken country means.

Changing the currency

Everything already recorded keeps the number it has — a sale of 50,000 becomes 50,000 of the new currency, not its value converted. Only change it if the currency was wrong from the start. The page says so again when you do.

Categories

How your money is grouped, and where each group lands in the profit and loss. Those are two different questions:

• The category is what you call it — Fuel, Rent, Deliveries.
• The account group is the line of the P&L it appears on — cost of sales, an operating expense, and so on.

A category with no account group still counts in your totals; it sits under Unclassified until you say where it belongs, and the page tells you how many are waiting. Tap Where it lands to settle one.

You can add a category, rename one, and archive one you no longer use. Archiving takes it out of the pickers and changes nothing already recorded under it. Show archived brings them back into view, and Restore puts one back.

Grouping by job, site or grant instead of by kind? That is Classes.

Notifications

A grid: every kind of event, and whether it reaches you in the app, by email, or both.

How and when it reaches you opens the delivery settings:

• Email — each one as it happens, or bundled into one daily email.
• Quiet hours — nothing emails you between the two times; it waits.
• Alert strips on pages — a line at the top of Home, Transactions, Invoices or Balances when something there needs you.

Getting paid

What a customer sees when they open one of your invoice links and come to pay.

Choose the rail you actually collect on — hosted checkout, mobile money, or bank transfer — and the page asks only for the details that rail needs. A bank branch on a mobile money invoice is how customers end up paying the wrong place.

• What they see — the heading, the button, and anything else they should know.
• Matching the money back — what you ask them to put as a reference. Leave the fixed reference empty and the invoice number is used, which is what most businesses want.
• A number they can call when a payment does not go through.

Taking card payments through Paystack or Flutterwave? Their keys are held by SBB rather than typed in by you — ask support to connect them once. Everything else on the page is yours to change at any time.

Controls

Two guardrails people think of as one.

Approvals — what waits for a person before it counts:

• I approve big amounts — anything over the amount you set waits for you.
• Ask for a receipt — a spend over the amount you set is flagged until a receipt is attached, and clears itself when one arrives.
• My accountant reviews large entries — anything over the amount you set goes to them.

Ready-made offers whole policies (cautious, balanced, hands-off) you can apply and then adjust. Saving re-checks everything already waiting under the new rules.

Kiongozi — what the assistant may do here: read and summarise your books, suggest what to do, act when you ask it to, change what is already recorded, and whether it must ask you before anything is written. Leave ask me before anything is written on unless you have a reason not to.

How much it may spend sets how hard the assistant thinks, and caps what it uses in a day or a month. Zero means no limit. Your plan's own allowance is on Your plan.

What changed here shows who changed these settings and when.

Your plan

What you are on, what it costs in your own currency, and when it renews or the trial ends. If the assistant has an allowance, this shows how much of this month's is used.

What you use turns whole parts of SBB on and off — Accounts, Inventory & POS, HR & Payroll, NGO & Grants, Circles. Turning one off takes it out of your navigation. Nothing recorded is touched, and turning it back on brings it all back.

What you have paid lists every subscription payment, what it was for, and whether it went through. Compare plans opens the rate card.

Settings that live elsewhere

People and permissions, branches and tills, tax and exporting your books are their own pages. The settings hub lists them and search finds them, so you never have to remember which is which.

Recycle bin

Settings → Recycle bin (owners only) holds everything deleted in the last while — transactions, invoices and people.

• How long deleted things are kept — 14 days unless you change it. Pick 30, 90, 180 days or a year, type your own number of days, or choose Delete at once to skip the bin. Press Save policy in the bar that appears.
• Deleted items — filter by kind, and see who deleted each one, when, and why. Put back returns it to where it was. Delete forever removes it for good, after asking you first.
• Each item says how long it has left. When the time runs out it is removed automatically.