Help & guide

Everything Corva Desk can do for your business, in one place, whether you use it already or are deciding whether to. Sections marked Admin are for administrators. If you use Corva Desk and don't see a feature in your menus, it may not be switched on for your account yet: an administrator can enable modules under Settings → Features.

Getting around

The bar across the top is the same on every page:

• The logo (top-left) returns to your dashboard.
• The module icons in the middle open each area you have access to (Tickets, Contacts, Invoices, and so on).
• ? opens this guide in a new tab.
• The bell shows recent notifications; a number means unread items.
• The cog holds the admin tools and, under Your account, your personal Settings (light or dark theme, your quick-switch PIN — saved for you alone).
• The people icon (admins only) lets you view as another role, to see exactly what a colleague on that role sees. A banner reminds you while you're doing it; click Return to Administrator to stop.
• If your administrator has enabled it, a switch icon lets you take over the session as another user of your team by typing that user's PIN — no full login. Handy on a shared machine behind a counter. Set your own PIN under Your account → Settings. Switching loses any unsaved changes on the page, and if the new user can't see the current page it goes to your dashboard.
• Sign out ends your session.

Your dashboard

The page after you sign in is your own dashboard: one figure per tile, from every area you can see. You arrange it, and nobody else sees your arrangement.

• Edit dashboard puts small buttons on each tile: − and + make it narrower or wider (one to six columns), ↑ and ↓ swap it with the tile before or after it, and × removes it. The page saves as you go and stays where you are.
• On a wide screen you can also drag a tile to any spot. A dashed outline shows where it will land. Tiles stay where you put them, gaps included. Only tiles in the way move, and they move down. On a phone, tiles stack in order and the buttons arrange them.
• Add tiles lists the rest you can see. Reset to default puts the starting set back.
• Text cut short in a list shows in full when you point at it.
• The Period (this week, last week, this month, last month, all time) is remembered for you. Tiles marked with the period follow it, such as Resolved tickets (by the date each ticket was closed) and Paid (by the date of the payment). Tiles marked now always show the state now: what is open, outstanding or overdue.
• A tile you can't see at the moment — your role changed, or an area was switched off — keeps its place and comes back when you can see it again.

Wherever you pick a customer, the dropdown lets you type to filter instead of scrolling.

• Page width: pages open at a comfortable, centred width. The small arrows before a page's title switch to the full width of your screen and back. Your choice is remembered for you on every page and every device.
• Lists: long lists come in pages. Use Show to put more on a page, and Prev / Next to move through them. On most tables, Columns lets you tick which columns to show, and you can drag the right edge of a column heading to resize it. Reset columns puts a table back as it was. These table choices are remembered in this browser.

Contacts

Your contacts are everyone you deal with, in one list: each is a business or an individual, with its own email, phone and website. Everything else (tickets, invoices, assets) attaches to a contact, so this is usually where a new relationship starts. A contact can carry a reference of your own, which is handy for NFC tags and quoting back.

• Related contacts link one contact to another with a role, e.g. a person who is the Owner of a business. One person can be related to several businesses and still be a customer in their own right, without being entered twice. Each contact's page shows both sides: who is related to it, and what it is related to.
• Addresses: besides the main address, a contact can have invoice and delivery addresses. A new invoice or quote is addressed to the invoice address when there is one; an invoice already issued never changes.
• On a ticket or invoice, the contact person is chosen from the customer itself and the contacts related to it.

Tickets (Helpdesk)

A ticket is a job or request. Create one, attach the customer and, if you like, the person there you're dealing with, set a priority, put it in a queue, and assign it to a colleague.

• Statuses are your own list (e.g. New, In progress, Waiting, Done), each mapped to open or closed — an Admin edits them.
• Tags are added from a ticket. The Tags button on the ticket list lets anyone who manages tickets rename a tag, which changes it on every ticket, or delete it, which removes it from every ticket. Renaming a tag to one that already exists merges the two.
• The conversation records every update. A note can be customer-facing (part of the conversation), an internal note (staff only), or a private note (the most restricted). Add tags, participants and file attachments as needed.
• Print receipt prints the compact counter slip (an 80mm thermal roll by default); Print details prints the full A4 sheet, and you choose per print whether to include the conversation and the internal / private notes.
• Create invoice raises a draft invoice for the ticket's customer, linked back.
• If you use device monitoring, an offline or disk alert can open a ticket automatically.

Ticket emails

Corva Desk can email your team when something happens on a ticket they're assigned to or are a participant on. It emails them when a customer replies, when a ticket is assigned to them, and when a colleague adds a note or changes the status. The email includes the message and a link to the ticket.

• Your own choice: Settings → Your account → Settings → Ticket emails. Each kind of email can follow the team default, or be on or off just for you. You can also choose whether emails keep coming while you're marked Away (off unless you turn it on).
• Admin Settings → Module settings → Ticket emails sets the team defaults. It also decides whether the customer's other people added to a ticket get copies of customer replies (on by default) and of your emailed updates (off by default), and how long the record of sent emails is kept (7 to 365 days, default 90).
• Nobody is emailed about their own actions. A private note is announced without its text. Internal notes never go to customers.
• To stop copies going to one of the customer's people, remove them from the ticket's participants. Their earlier messages stay on the ticket.
• Emails go out within about a minute, and follow your Sending setting (off, test or live).

Email in: tickets from email

Admin Tickets → Email in gives you addresses on your own domain, such as enquiries@yourname.corvadesk.com. Each email sent to one becomes a ticket. It's ideal for a website contact form. The whole email is kept as the enquiry, and pictures are attached. Nothing is stored in an inbox, and nothing is sent back to the sender.

• Who may send: listed senders only (for a web form, the address your form sends from), existing customers only, anyone, or nobody.
• Reading the email: choose where the customer comes from: labelled fields in a form, whoever sent the email, or nobody. For a form, type each field's label as it appears in the email (First Name, Email Address, …). The customer is matched by email address, or added if new. A phone field that isn't a real phone number (say, "43") is left off the new contact; the original email is still on the ticket. You can also set the ticket subject, for example Web enquiry from {name}.
• Test these rules: paste an example email to see what would be read from it, before any real mail arrives. Nothing is saved.
• Held messages: mail that isn't allowed in is held for review. Make it a ticket or delete it. Held mail is deleted automatically after the number of days you choose (at most 28).
• The page shows Ready once your domain is set up to receive mail. Until then, mail to these addresses won't arrive.
• Needs the Configure inbound email permission. Administrators have it, and it can be given to other roles.

Invoices, quotes & credit notes

Raise invoices, quotes and credit notes. Add lines (from your product list or free-typed), each with a quantity and a tax rate. The tax on a line is snapshotted as it was charged, so a document stays true years later. Issue it, mark it paid, or void it; a quote can convert to an invoice, and a ticket can raise one for you. Every document downloads as a PDF (see Printing), and the layout is yours to edit. The wording "Tax" follows your label setting, so it can read "VAT".

Admin Document numbering (Settings → Module settings) sets how invoices, quotes and credit notes are numbered, each with its own series, for example INV-{YYYY}-{SEQ:4} → INV-2026-0001:

• Use {YYYY} or {YY} for the year, {MM} for the month, and one {SEQ} for the running number. {SEQ:4} pads it to four digits.
• Choose whether the count restarts every year, every month, or never. A restart needs the year (and the month, for monthly) in the number, so no number can ever come round again.
• You can set a starting number, for example to carry on from a previous system.
• A series can be corrected until the first document uses it. After that it's kept for good. To change your numbering later, start a new series from a chosen date. Numbers already issued never change, and no number can be used twice.

Products & prices

A catalogue of the things you sell or charge for, so invoice and quote lines fill in with the right description and price. Group items (for example Labour, Parts, Memory) to keep the list tidy.

Subscriptions

Recurring charges — a support retainer, a monthly plan — that raise invoices on a schedule instead of by hand.

Assets

The equipment you look after for a customer — a laptop, a boiler, a machine. Each asset can carry an NFC tag and its own history, and links to the tickets raised against it, so you can see everything that has happened to one item.

Devices (remote monitoring)

Corva Desk's built-in RMM watches Windows PCs through a lightweight agent.

• Enrolling a PC: from Devices, generate a one-time token and download the installer. Copy it to the PC and double-click corva-agent-installer.cmd — it elevates itself (one prompt), installs, and the PC appears within a minute. (A PowerShell .ps1 is offered too, for the technically inclined.)
• Inventory & performance: each device shows its hardware and software, security status, and CPU / memory / disk over time.
• Alerts: set what happens when a device goes offline or a disk fills — nothing, a notification, a ticket, or both — per device or per group.
• Folders organise a customer's devices; remote control opens a session (via MeshCentral) when configured.
• Updating an agent: new agents update themselves when staged for your site; a very old agent may need the installer re-running or its binary swapped on the machine.

Signatures

Send a document for electronic signature. The signer gets their own secure link (no login), signs, and the completed PDF comes back — useful for agreements, consent and hand-over forms.

Calendar

Create as many named calendars as you need (Staff holidays, Site visits, …), each its own colour.

• Share a calendar read-only or read/write with colleagues.
• Overlay several at once, colour-coded, to spot clashes by eye (the pills toggle instantly).
• Entries can be all-day or timed, and recur (daily, weekly, …).
• An entry may link to a ticket, invoice, staff member or customer, or be free text.
• View by month, week, day or a two-month look-ahead, and adjust the size to suit your screen.

To-do & tasks

To-do lists are personal checklists you can optionally share read-only or read/write. Tasks track the smaller pieces of work that make up a job. Both keep things from slipping without needing a full ticket.

Integrations

Admin Under Settings → Integrations (shown when enabled):

• Odoo Sync is for moving from Odoo. While you are connected, Odoo is the master and Corva Desk keeps an exact copy of its tickets (with their conversations), contacts and invoices. Every sync lists what changed. In Auto mode the changes are applied at once. In Review mode they wait for you to Apply or Skip them. Messages keep their author, line breaks and links, and an edit or deletion in Odoo follows across. Full resync reads everything again. While a sync runs, the page counts down to when it should finish.
• While connected, automatic actions such as auto-close leave copied tickets alone: Odoo decides.
• When you are ready to make Corva Desk your main system, we run a final sync together and switch the Odoo connection off. From then on Corva Desk is the master. Nothing more comes from Odoo, and nothing is ever sent to it.
• QuickBooks connects Corva Desk to QuickBooks Online to keep invoices and customers in step, once you've authorised it.

Printing your documents

Admin Settings → Printing controls how three documents look as PDFs. Every one uses your logo automatically and prints to any printer.

• Ticket receipt — the 80mm counter slip, built row by row with no code. Each row is a field (or Free text / Divider / Blank space / Logo) with its own prefix, suffix, font, size, weight and alignment; open a row to edit it, drag the handle to reorder, and the ticket number can be plain, boxed or white-on-black. Remove the Logo row to hide the logo. A thermal roll prints only as long as its content.
• Ticket details and Invoice — A4 documents you edit as an HTML template (a live sample preview and the list of available fields are on the page).
• Choose the paper size (A4, Letter, 80mm / 58mm roll, or a custom width), preview a sample, and reset to default at any time.

Administration & settings

Admin The cog menu holds the tools an administrator uses to run the account (the operator / platform console is separate and not covered here):

• Users — add colleagues and set each one's role. Each user has a Manage page where you can, without needing the person present, change their sign-in email, set a new password (optionally forcing them to choose their own at the next sign-in), and set their IP access (below). This page also turns Quick-switch PIN on or off (PIN switching on shared machines — a convenience with a weaker credential, so it's off until you choose it; each user then sets their own PIN under Your account → Settings).
• Password policy — on the Users page: set the minimum password length and whether passwords must mix letters and numbers. Reusing one of a user's last few passwords is always blocked. (An old password with just a digit changed can't be detected — old passwords are never kept in readable form.)
• Known IP addresses & IP locking — on the Users page, name the networks your team works from (a single address like 203.0.113.5, or a range like 203.0.113.0/24). Then on a user's Manage page you can lock them to those networks (allow only these — blocked everywhere else) or away from them (block these — allowed everywhere else). A user reaching Corva Desk from a disallowed network sees a "not permitted here" page. This is an extra layer, not a replacement for a good password. If nothing is ticked, the user isn't restricted.
• Away — a user can mark themselves away under Your account → Settings, or an admin can mark them away on their Manage page. While someone is away, a customer reply on a ticket assigned to them gets an automatic acknowledgement posted to the ticket, so they aren't left waiting. Give a return date, or a number of days, and Away switches off by itself on that day. Edit the wording on the Ticket editing settings page (use {name} for the away person's name, and {back} for their return date when they have set one).
• Roles — decide what each role may see and do, permission by permission, grouped by module (for example, working on tickets and replying to the customer are separate, as are issuing an invoice and raising a credit note). Administration itself is split too, so you can let someone manage users, or see the activity log, without giving them everything. Some safeguards: you can only grant permissions you hold yourself; only an Administrator can change, assign or manage the Administrator role; a switched-off module's permissions are hidden and kept as they were; and every change is recorded in Recent activity. Use view as role to check the result.
• Features — switch modules on or off for your account.
• Ticket editing — whether notes can be edited after posting, and the wording of the away acknowledgement.
• Invitations — invite a customer or a new administrator.
• Recent activity — an audit trail of significant actions (role changes, releases…).
• Sending — how outbound email is sent (and whether it is live yet).
• Phone — how phone numbers are displayed.
• Branding — your company name, address and contact details, and your logo.
• Printing — the document designer (above).
• Subscription — your plan and trial.
• Your data — export and back up what's yours.
• Your account → Settings — manage your own name, sign-in email and password, see your job role (set by an administrator), and set your light/dark theme and quick-switch PIN. You can also mark yourself Away here (below). Chosen per person, not an admin setting.

Can't find something, or something here doesn't match what you see? If you use Corva Desk, your administrator can check which modules are enabled. This guide grows as Corva Desk does.