First Week Checklist

This page is the one-time setup checklist for a new user.

Use it during your first week in the system. After that, move to the normal Weekly Checklist.

The goal here is not to teach every feature in full. The goal is to get you to a clean starting point so the rest of the docs make sense.

Step 1: Make Sure Your Account Is Correct

Before doing anything else, verify the basics of your account.

Check that:

• you can sign in successfully
• your name looks correct
• your iRacing Customer ID is correct
• your onboarding/profile information was actually saved

This matters because driver identity flows into several other systems later.

If your account identity is wrong at the beginning, contract, stats, and free-agency expectations become harder to untangle later.

Step 2: Complete Your Driver Setup

Make sure your driver onboarding is complete.

At minimum, confirm that:

• your driver profile exists
• your basic driver information is saved
• your series interests are set correctly
• Open to Offers is enabled if you want organizations to find you in free agency

If you are only planning to drive and not own a team, this is the most important setup layer.

Step 3: Learn the Basic Dashboard Layout

Before trying to operate any deeper system, open Dashboard Basics.

You do not need to memorize everything. You just need to understand the main working areas:

• the general dashboard shell
• the difference between driver and organization context
• where organization-specific work lives
• how the left-side docs navigation maps to the product areas you will actually use

This is the step that keeps the rest of the first week from feeling random.

Step 4: Decide What Role You Are Playing

Your first week looks different depending on who you are.

In practical terms, most users fall into one of these groups:

• driver only
• organization owner
• owner-driver
• team member inside someone else's organization

You should know which one applies to you before going further, because the relevant pages and permissions are different.

Step 5: If You Are Creating a Team, Build the Organization

If you plan to own or manage a team, go straight to Organization Creation.

That is the correct next step if you need to:

• create an organization
• purchase your first car
• prepare to sign drivers
• move into assignments, sponsorships, and finances later

If you are not becoming an owner, skip this and move to the next step instead.

Step 6: Confirm You Can See the Right Working Context

Once your role is clear, make sure the dashboard actually reflects it.

Examples:

• if you are an owner, confirm your organization appears in the organization area
• if you joined another team, confirm the correct organization is visible to you
• if you should have scoped car access, confirm the expected cars and pages are available

If the right context is not visible, do not keep going deeper into the workflow. Fix that first.

Step 7: Learn the Four Core Organization Systems

If you are working inside an organization, your first week should focus on these four guides:

• Contracts
• Race Assignments
• Sponsorships
• Finances

These are the systems that control the real weekly operating flow.

You do not need to master them all at once, but you do need to understand how they connect.

Step 8: Understand the Correct Order

Your first week gets much easier if you understand the right operating order.

For most team-related work, that order is:

1. contracts
2. race assignments
3. sponsorships
4. finances

That order matters because:

• contracts define the driver deal
• race assignments make the deal operational on the car
• sponsorships work better when the assignment is correct
• finances make more sense once the rest of the setup is clean

If you learn this order during the first week, the rest of the season becomes much easier to manage.

Step 9: Run a Dry Practice Review

Before you treat the next race as live weekly work, do one dry pass through the main pages you will be using.

A good first-week dry run is:

1. open Organizations
2. open Contracts
3. open Race Assignments
4. open Sponsorships
5. open Finances
6. open Weekly Checklist

You are not trying to complete every action here. You are making sure the pages load in a way that makes sense to you.

What Success Looks Like at the End of Week One

By the end of your first week, you should be able to answer these questions confidently:

• Do I understand whether I am operating as a driver, team member, or owner?
• Do I know where my organization work lives?
• Do I understand the difference between contracts and race assignments?
• Do I know where sponsorship work happens?
• Do I understand the difference between the organization account and the car accounts?
• Do I know which page to open at the start of a normal race week?

If the answer is yes, you are ready to stop using the first-week checklist and move into the normal weekly workflow.

Common First-Week Mistakes

Jumping into finances before understanding account scope

This makes the finance page feel much more confusing than it actually is.

Assuming a signed driver is automatically race-ready

That skips race assignments, which is one of the biggest workflow mistakes new users make.

Trying to learn every page at once

The system is broad. It works better when you learn the pages in operating order.

Ignoring permissions or missing organization context

If the right organization or car is not visible, stop and resolve that first. The rest of the workflow depends on it.

Final Reminder

The first week is mainly about orientation.

You do not need to master the whole platform immediately. You need to understand your role, your working context, and the order in which the core systems fit together.

Once that is clear, use the normal weekly workflow pages from there.