The live demo

How the live demo works: your own demo company for a few hours, the guided tours, and what is switched off in it.

What it is for

The live demo lets you try FSMCore before you sign up. You get your own private copy of a made-up flooring company, with 14 months of jobs, estimates, invoices, crew, hours and photos. You can do real work in it: write an invoice, plan a week, approve hours. Nobody else sees your copy, and you never see anyone else's.

Open the live demo

Click Try the live demo on the FSMCore website. Within a few seconds you are signed in as the owner of your own demo company, on its own web address (it starts with demo-). There is no form to fill in, no email and no password.

If every ready copy is in use, the page says Preparing your demo... while one is filled for you. That takes a few minutes; the page opens your demo by itself, so you do not need to reload.

How long it lasts

Your demo company lives for 3 hours from the moment you open it. The bar at the top of every page shows the time left. When the time is up, the demo company is deleted with everything you did in it: its records, its files, the made-up people and your own sign-in.

To keep working with your own data, click Start your free trial in the bar.

The guided tours

The guide is the panel with the dark Guide header. On a computer screen of 1280 pixels or wider it is a column on the right and the page moves over to make room for it; on a smaller screen or a phone it is a sheet at the bottom and the page scrolls above it. It is on when you open the demo. Pick one of six tours:

Write and send an invoice
Price a job, then invoice it
Plan the week
Log hours, then approve them
Margins and the books
Try the AI with your own key

Each step asks for one thing: click a button, pick a job, type a value. The guide scrolls to the button or field and draws an orange ring around it; nothing else on the page is dimmed or covered. When the thing is inside a closed menu (the ⋮ menu of a row, your account menu, the menu on a phone), the ring sits on the button that opens the menu first and the panel says to open it.

Text to type has a Copy button. When you have to pick a job or a client, the step names it exactly as the list shows it and gives a short word to type into the list's search. If you pick something else, the panel says so in one line.

A step is done when the thing really happened (the field is filled, the window opened, the invoice is saved, the week is approved), not after a timer, and the next step's button or field is ringed straight away. If you close a window before its step is done, the guide goes back to the step that opens it. If you go to another page, the panel says so and shows Take me there.

The panel has Back, Skip this step, Next on reading steps, and Turn off the guide. The arrow in its header makes it a one-line bar and opens it again. Guide in the bar at the top turns it back on. Where you are in a tour, and whether the panel is small, is kept for your demo company, also when you switch to the crew app or the books.

What is switched off

The demo company is real FSMCore with a few things switched off:

Email. Nothing is ever emailed from a demo company. Issuing or sending an invoice still works on screen, with the note "Demo: emails are not really sent."
Billing and plans. Settings > Billing is not there.
Invitations. Nobody can be invited from a demo company.
The API. Settings > API cannot be switched on and no token can be made.
Export. Settings > Export is not there.
Deleting the company. It deletes itself when the time is up.
Search engines. A demo company is never shown in search results.

Two-factor sign-in is not asked for in a demo company.

Your own AI key

FSMCore has no AI account of its own: the AI assistant always uses the company's own key. In the demo you can paste your own key in Settings > AI setup, exactly as in a real company. It is stored encrypted and deleted with the demo company.

Limits

One address (the same internet connection) can open the live demo 3 times a day, and only so many demo companies can be open at once. Over a limit, the page says so and offers Start a free trial instead.

Common mistakes

This demo link has expired. The link that signs you in works once, for a few minutes. Open the live demo again from the website.
My changes are gone. The demo company was deleted when its 3 hours were up. A free trial keeps your data.