Prelude Street

This article is to help explain how your data is stored and accessed on our web platform.

If you find login pages, URLs, databases, usernames and passwords a bit confusing, maybe this analogy will help to clarify.

Every time you go home, without thinking about it, you go to the correct street, the correct house, open the front door with the correct key, then announce yourself using your correct name.  Think of logging in to the software in the same way:

The correct street is your login page.
It is a unique place in the internet and is the only place from which you can access your Prelude data.
If you are an accountant with a bundle, it is where you access your Client Manager and where your clients access their databases.
If you try to use the wrong login page, i.e. go to the wrong street, you won’t be able to gain access to anything.
The login page is identified by a URL, e.g.

https://my.prelude.software/app

https://my.prelude.software/clients

The correct house is your database and your correct name is your username.
To log in you must identify the database you want to log in to, and the user in that database you want to log in as.
As many databases will be used by just one person with one user, if you enter just the database name (which is probably the only name you were provided with), the software will automatically log in as the one user in that database.
It is only businesses with multiple databases and/or multiple users that must be mindful of the database and username combination that is used to log in.
The same applies whether you are an accountant logging in to your Client Manager or a business logging in to your accounts. Ensure that you are on the correct street and go to the correct house in that street.

The correct key is the password.
Each user in each database has their own password, which should not be obvious, should be different from other users’ passwords, should not be written down in a way that can be identified as your password and should not be disclosed to anyone.
This deviates a bit from the front-door key analogy, but I think it is the easiest bit to understand.

Hopefully, this helps to clarify the purpose and need for these important details and will help you to remember them, so that you can access your data quickly and easily every time.