Your first initiative in 5 minutes

The fastest way to see Roiva work end to end: create an initiative, record a cost, log some value, and approve it.

Step 1: Create the initiative

Initiatives → New Initiative offers five ways in:

Start from a template — a common AI use case with its formulas, metrics and planned figures already filled in. Not sure which? Describe your business and Roiva recommends templates.
Use the setup guide — a step-by-step walkthrough.
Upload documents — a project plan, deck or budget; Roiva proposes the initiative's fields for you to review. See Creating initiatives from documents.
Import the ones you already run (Import initiatives) — a folder of SOWs or a register spreadsheet, one initiative each. Owners and Admins can also import a whole tracker workbook: see Importing a tracker workbook.
Start from scratch (Create manually) — the form: title, category, priority, owner, and optional financial expectations (planned CapEx and OpEx, planned cash value, and planned freed capacity beside it). The owner is you unless you pick someone else or choose — Unassigned.

A new initiative starts in the Identified stage. One imported from a register spreadsheet with Import initiatives can start in Reviewing, or further along if you could approve it. Your plan limits how many initiatives are measured at a time (3 on Free), not how many you list. An initiative counts once it's Implementing or Live, or once someone records its value while it's still an idea. Ideas with no value, completed, rejected and dismissed initiatives, and sample data don't count (see Plans and billing).

Step 2: Record a cost

Open the initiative's Costs tab and choose Add costs → Record a cost. An initiative's costs are what you pay to run it, so leave out spend that serves other work, even on the same vendor's bill. Pick the cost type (software, tokens, implementation, infrastructure and so on), the amount and the period. CapEx or OpEx follows from the type unless you change it. With a finance system or a model provider connected, its bills, or the part of them that's the initiative's, can book themselves instead.

Step 3: Log value

Open the Value Entries tab and choose Add value → Log value: the entry type (cost savings, revenue gain, freed capacity…), the amount and the period. The amount is in dollars, and the type decides which figure it counts in. A $4,000 monthly contractor invoice you no longer pay is $4,000 of cost savings, which is cash. Fifty hours of a sales rep's time saved at $100 an hour is $5,000 of freed capacity: worth knowing, but payroll is the same, so it's reported beside cash and in no ROI. It's saved as a draft.

Step 4: Submit it and approve it

Value counts only once someone approves it: cash toward ROI, freed capacity beside it. Open the entry and choose Submit for review. It then waits in the Inbox of the initiative's approvers, if it has an approval chain, or otherwise for any Owner or Admin. By default nobody approves an entry they recorded or last edited, unless nobody else in the account could approve it. Until it's approved, it shows on ROI → Provisional as waiting, never in ROI.

Step 5: See the ROI

Open ROI in the sidebar. The initiative's cost, cash value and freed capacity are in the portfolio totals, and ROI → Initiatives has its own row. ROI is cash ROI: cash value less cost, over cost.

Want sample data first?

An Owner or Admin can load a set of sample initiatives from Organization Settings → General → Sample Data → Load sample data, and remove them again from the same place. While sample data is all the account has, it's counted and labeled as sample. Once one of your own initiatives has a cost or approved value, every figure (Home, ROI and the reports) leaves the sample initiatives out, and once you have an initiative of your own the Inbox does too. The Board Brief and Value Evidence Register always leave them out.

Approving value and initiatives — who approves what
Adding costs and value entries — every way to get figures in
The initiative lifecycle — moving an initiative from idea to live