Getting started

CARDO is invite-only. There is no sign-up page: an administrator at your company adds you, you receive an email, and your account exists from the moment you accept. This guide covers that first day.

Accepting an invitation

The invitation email contains a link that is personal to you. Open it and one of two things happens:

• You do not have an account yet. You are asked to choose a password, and you are signed in as soon as you set it. You do not need to type it again on the next screen.
• You already have an account (for example, you were invited to a second company). The invitation is attached to your existing account and your password is unchanged.

Invitations expire. If the link tells you it is no longer valid, ask the person who invited you to send a new one; they can see pending invitations on the project settings page.

Signing in

Go to Sign in and use your email address and password, or Sign in with Microsoft if your company has set that up. If two-factor authentication is switched on for your account, you will be asked for the six-digit code from your authenticator app, or one of your backup codes, after your password.

Forgotten your password? Enter your email address on the sign-in page and choose Forgot your password. If the address has an account, a reset email is on its way; if it does not, nothing is sent, and the page says the same thing either way so an address cannot be checked from outside.

Companies and projects

Everything in CARDO sits inside a company (your organisation), and inside a company sits one or more projects. A project holds one risk register, its rates library, its programme, its simulations and its reports.

After signing in you land on your Projects list. You see only the projects you have been given a role on, unless you are a company admin, in which case you administer all of them. What you can do inside a project depends on that role: see Roles and permissions.

Finding your way around

Inside a project, the sidebar has a page for each stage of the work. You only see the pages your role can view, so a Viewer’s sidebar is shorter than an Admin’s.

Dashboard

The headline numbers for the project.

Risk Register

Every risk and assumption, searchable by ID, title or owner, with the split of exposure between client and contractor above the table.

WBS Explorer

The work breakdown structure with simulated risk cost rolled up to every node.

QCRA Analysis

Monte Carlo simulation of the register: confidence curves, histogram and sensitivity.

QSRA (Schedule)

The imported programme, risk-to-activity links and schedule simulation.

Rates Library

The versioned rate library that cost lines are built from.

Reports

The cost and schedule reports, and the PDF export.

Documents

Files attached to the project, including programmes waiting to be imported.

Project Admin

Project details, team members and invitations. Admins only.

Your own account settings (password, two-factor authentication, profile, theme, notifications) live under your name at the top of the page, not inside any project.

A sensible first hour

1. Turn on two-factor authentication. It takes two minutes and the register holds commercially sensitive numbers. See Two-factor authentication.
2. Open the register and read three or four risks end to end, including the cost lines and the change log. That is the shape every record takes.
3. Look at the rates library before estimating anything. Cost lines pull their rates from the published version, so the library is the basis of every number you will produce.
4. Run a simulation if your role allows it. It costs nothing, it is repeatable (the seed is fixed), and it shows you immediately which risks drive the total.