> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.rescueconsole.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Getting Started with RescueConsole: Sign Up and Go Live > Create your account, configure your organization, import your data, invite your team, and publish your public website — everything you need to go live. You can have RescueConsole running with your real data in under an hour. This guide walks you through every step from creating your account to publishing your public-facing website. You do not need to finish every step before the platform is useful — most rescues start entering animals and people on day one and fill in the rest as they go. RescueConsole is completely free for your first full year — not a limited trial, but the whole product including every workspace, your own domain, and unlimited staff and volunteer accounts. No credit card is required to sign up. ### Create your account Go to [rescueconsole.com/signup](https://rescueconsole.com/signup) and fill in a few details about your organization: * **Organization name** — the name as you'd like it to appear across the platform and your public website. * **Subdomain** — choose a short identifier for your organization's URL. Your team will access the app at `yourorg.rescueconsole.com`. You can connect your own domain later, but your subdomain is permanent. * **Your name, email address, and password** — this becomes your account as the organization admin. Once you submit, you're in. Your free year starts from the first full month after you sign up, so joining partway through a month doesn't cost you a month. ### Configure your organization Before you start adding animals and people, take a few minutes to set up the basics under **Settings**: * **Time zone** — set your organization's time zone so shift times, calendar dates, and due dates are correct for everyone on your team. * **Locations** — add the sites where your animals are housed and volunteers work (shelters, foster coordinators' home bases, adoption event venues). You can nest rooms, kennels, and units under each location. * **Animal statuses** — RescueConsole starts you with eighteen standard shelter statuses in three groups. Rename them to match your vocabulary, add your own, and set the care state that each status represents. The care state is what drives your dashboard counts and what the public sees. * **Medications and medical lists** — if you track medical records, add your commonly used medications under Settings so they're ready to select on any animal record. You don't have to configure everything before your first import. Start with your time zone and locations, then adjust statuses once you see how your animal list looks. ### Import your existing data If your rescue has been running on spreadsheets, you can bring your animals, people, and donations in on day one. RescueConsole's importer lets you map columns from your CSV to the right fields, including any custom fields you've added. Go to **Settings → Import** and choose what you're bringing in. See [Import Animals, People, and Donations from a Spreadsheet](/importing-data) for a full walkthrough including how to prepare your file, how photos are handled, and what to know about duplicate detection for people records. If you're migrating from **RescueGroups.org** or **ShelterLuv**, use the dedicated integrations instead of the spreadsheet importer — they bring across animals, people, medical records, and more with field-level mapping. Find both under **Settings → Integrations**. ### Invite your team Add staff, coordinators, and vets under **Settings → Team**. For each person you invite, assign one of the thirteen built-in roles — from Organization Admin down to Read Only — or create a custom role with per-workspace read, write, and admin access. * **Volunteers** are not staff accounts and don't need to be invited here. When a volunteer fills in your public volunteer form, they're added as a person and can be approved to book shifts. * **Role-based access** means a volunteer who signs in sees only their shifts and available openings. A vet sees the medical records they need. The adoptions coordinator sees the adoptions inbox. Nothing is visible to someone whose role doesn't include it. Invited team members receive an email with a link to set their password. You can adjust anyone's role at any time. ### Publish your public website RescueConsole generates a full public website from your data — no theme to install, nothing to keep updated. Go to **Settings → Public** to configure it: * Upload your logo and choose an accent color (the platform checks it for contrast automatically). * Enable the pages you want: Adopt, Donate, Volunteer, Foster, About, Resources, Events, and Contact. * Connect your own domain by following the DNS instructions shown in Settings. Until then, your site is live at `yourorg.rescueconsole.com`. Animals marked public, published events, and your live forms appear on your site the moment you mark them — no republishing step required. If you already have a website you want to keep, you can embed just the adoptable animals grid using the snippet shown in Settings → Public instead of switching to the full RescueConsole site. ## What to do next Once you've completed these steps, explore what each workspace can do for your day-to-day operations: Start adding animals, setting statuses, and building out medical records. Review imported contacts, merge duplicates, and set up application-to-person conversion. Open your first shift windows and approve your volunteers to start booking. Create your team inboxes and forward your existing email addresses. Want a guided walkthrough of your specific intake, adoption, and volunteer workflows? Request a demo at [rescueconsole.com/demo](https://rescueconsole.com/demo) and we'll walk through the platform on your own data.