A Tour of Organization Settings
A walk through every settings screen in Muin, grouped by the question it answers: who we are, who may do what, what the AI knows, what members see, and what happens when something fails.
Settings is the part of a platform nobody reads about until something is already wrong. This is the tour, organized by the question each screen answers rather than by where it sits in the menu.
Every screen named here is in the product today. Where something is not yet configurable, this post says so.
Who we are
Settings → Organization → Company holds your legal record: company name, legal name, industry, phone, website, Tax ID or EIN, your business address, and your regional settings.
Two fields there are worth getting right on day one, because so much depends on them. Timezone drives every displayed time, every scheduled send and every report period in the platform. Default Currency drives invoices, receipts, statements and exports. Legal Name and Tax ID appear on tax receipts, 1099s and year-end statements, so a stale value is a stale document.
Settings → Organization → Company Profile is a different record for a different reader: the AI. Industry, a business description, your mission statement, who your customers are, and your geographic focus. There is a Profile Completeness percentage on the screen, and it is the honest measure of how much the agents have to work with. A thin profile produces generic answers.
Settings → Organization → Brand Center can read your existing website and propose a brand from it. Enter your URL, give it about a minute, and it returns the colors, fonts, logo and style it found. You accept them one item at a time, not all at once, and nothing is public until you save. If your site has no strong branding it says so plainly rather than inventing a palette.
Who may do what
There are three different screens here and they are easy to confuse.
Roles and Permissions is the real one. Permissions are resolved per feature and per action, and the server enforces that answer on every request. The role editor has two views of the same thing: plain-language toggles grouped by outcome, with a live preview that spells out the effective permissions in plain English, and a raw feature-by-action matrix for when you need to see exactly which action is granted.
Menu Visibility is presentation only. It hides items for one person, on the My Menu tab, or for the whole organization, on the Organization tab. It grants and removes nothing. A hidden button is not a security control.
Approvals is the third, and it is the one organizations most often leave unanswered. It decides who has to say yes before money goes out. Three postures are offered: Small team, where one person approves; Standard, where small amounts are approved automatically and anything above a threshold needs an approver who is not the requester; and Strict, which adds a second approver above a threshold and separates whoever approves from whoever records the payment.
The screen is unusually direct about the stakes. Until you answer the question, it tells you: nobody has to approve money yet, and requests are approved the moment they are sent, with no person seeing them first. Loosen a rule and it asks you to confirm, in words: some money that waits for a second person today will go out without one.
Two kinds of request are deliberately not set there, because they are set one at a time with the thing they apply to: donor-advised fund recommendations, which live with each fund’s other spending rules, and leave requests, which live with the leave type.
Expense policy is next door. Settings → Organization → Expenses sets the request deadline, the mileage rate, the receipt threshold, spending caps and which kinds of claim you reimburse at all. The caps behave differently from each other on purpose: Max per expense blocks a claim above the limit, while Max per day and Max per event accept it, flag it, and route it to a person instead of approving it automatically. Approval thresholds are not on that screen, and it says so: they live in Approvals, so every flow uses the same ones.
What the AI knows
AI Customization teaches the agents your organization’s language: custom terminology, abbreviations, forbidden terms, synonyms, and the tone and verbosity to write in. You can override tone and guidance for one module without changing the rest.
AI Generation decides which generators may run and how much each one may create at a time. A blocked generator disappears from the screens that would have offered it, rather than failing when someone tries to use it.
Chat Tools decides what chat may do, rather than what it may say. Turn a tool off and chat will tell a user it cannot do that, instead of attempting it.
A fourth screen is often confused with these. Settings → Platform → Vocabulary renames the labels on screens, menus and reports. It changes what the product calls things; AI Customization changes what the AI says. If the problem is a mistranslation on a public page, neither is the right screen: use Languages and Glossary, where you can give the exact translation for a term or mark it Never translate (keep as-is). That last option is what you want for your organization’s name, your fund names and people’s names.
What our community sees
Member Portal controls two things. What members see sets each portal area to always show, show only once someone has activity there, or hide entirely, for both the portal menu and the home-page tiles. How members sign in chooses the doors: a 6-digit code by email or text, a one-click sign-in link, Continue with Google, and Continue with Apple. There are no member passwords at all.
The rule behind the provider buttons is worth knowing before you turn them on. A Google or Apple sign-in only succeeds when that account’s email matches a person you already have on file. Anyone else is told they are not in the system rather than being signed in.
Public Calendar controls what appears on your public calendar page, with a link to open the live page and check. Prayer Times computes adhan and iqama times daily from a location and a calculation convention, publishes them to your calendar and your public page, and has a Today panel showing exactly what your congregation sees right now. It also has Manual corrections, which add minutes to each computed time so Muin matches a board your community already reads. Zakat points zakat gifts at a zakat-eligible fund and names the fallback program for an undesignated gift.
Advisor Access is for the accountant or consultant who needs to see your dashboard but is not staff. Enter an email, confirm, and revoke whenever you like. They hold no role and are not a team member.
One person, one record
Muin keeps one record per person, with roles describing how that person relates to each module. The same record can be both an Employee and a Donor, which is why there is no separate donor list to keep in sync with the HR list.
People Registry tunes that: duplicate detection on or off, how strict the matching is, and the default sort order for the directory. Detection fires wherever a person is created, including a public form, a giving page and a kiosk check-in.
Custom Fields adds your own attributes to every person, and they become filters in the directory the moment you create them. Employee Fields does the same for employment records, where a field marked reportable can be pulled into HR reports.
People Data answers a question that quietly causes a lot of trouble: when your HR system and Muin disagree about an employee, which one wins? Nominate Muin or nominate a connected system. Pick the external system and those facts become read-only in Muin for everyone. Review drift then lists every employee where the two disagree, fact by fact, showing what Muin says against what the external system says, with an action to settle a whole column at once. It reports honestly how many records updated and how many could not.
What happens when something fails
This is the half of settings that only matters at the worst moment.
Connector Alerts sets how long a connector may be failing before anyone is paged, and who gets the email. With alerts off, a broken integration will not notify anybody.
Async Failure List Settings sets how far back the background-failure list opens when nobody has narrowed it. The reasoning on the screen is good advice generally: an incident is usually this week, not this quarter.
The list itself is Administration → Async Failures, and it is the first place to look when something simply did not happen. It shows what was attempted, how many attempts were made, the recorded error, and a plain-language note on what that error usually means. Two of its behaviors are deliberate and useful. Money failures are never re-driven from that page; it takes you to the surface that can charge safely without double-charging. And when it cannot read every source, it says so, with a count, rather than showing you a reassuring empty list.
Mobile Devices lists every enrolled device, with revoke and reset-pairing actions. A forgotten mobile PIN cannot be reset remotely, because the PIN is stored on the device, so revoking is how you force a fresh setup with a new PIN.
Compliance, procurement and modules
Compliance Settings holds your filing profile: legal form, state, fiscal year end and the federal-return facts every filing date is computed from. Saving it loads the matching state filings. Below them are who gets the reminders and, for a nonprofit, the IRS exempt-status check.
Procurement approvals, under Approvals, sets the rules for purchase requests and purchase orders and the default number of quotes. A purchase request that no rule covers is held, never approved by default.
Five business modules are available today: HR, Finance (with Vendors), Compliance, Nonprofit, and Spend (Procurement and Contracts). Trade is not yet available. Legally binding e-signatures are also not yet available; built-in acknowledgments are, free and unlimited.
The five-minute version
If you only have five minutes on a new workspace, in this order:
- Timezone and currency, on the Company screen.
- Modules, so your menu matches your work.
- Approvals, so money is not approved by nobody.
- Donation Notifications, if you take gifts, so somebody knows when one arrives.
- Connector Alerts, so a broken integration is not discovered a week late.
Everything else can wait until you need it, and the screen will tell you what it does when you get there.