The application

Forty three settings, and every one of them changes something you can see

People do not look at this software for five minutes. They sit with it for an afternoon, with a question that matters and a board meeting on Thursday. So the theme, the typeface, the text size, the density, the way a number is written and which figure leads a brief are all settings. They apply the instant they change, and they follow the account rather than the browser.

Build a twin What it can and cannot tell you

Nothing here changes a number. A setting decides how the application looks and what it does by default. The arithmetic is the same whichever theme you are in.

In the settings screen

Enough choices that two people will not end up with the same screen

Themes: 26plus one you make from two colours of your own
Accent colours: 25or any hex colour, corrected until it reads
Typefaces: 11Inter ships with it, the rest are already on your machine
Text size: 12 to 22pxone number that every chart, table and card scales from

Every setting was tested by measuring the page after it changed: the colour of the pixel, the size of the text, the space around a card, the characters in a figure.

Six of them did nothing at all when that test was first written, and one had been rendering every sum in the product as a word. A setting that is not measured is a promise, and this screen makes forty three of them.

Appearance

Twenty six themes, and none of them looks like another

Eighteen appearance settings. The ones people reach for first are here; the rest are in the same screen.

Themes

Light through to true black, warm and cool, plus two high contrast

Twelve light and fourteen dark. Midnight is true black, for an OLED screen and a room with the lights off. Each theme remaps every surface rather than inverting the last one, so each is measured on its own. Every one is generated: a theme is a hue and a depth, its surfaces are built from those, and its text, greys and lines are computed by walking each colour away from its background until it hits a measured contrast. The build also measures how far apart any two themes look and fails when two are too close to tell apart.

Your own theme

Two colours of yours become a whole theme

Pick a background and a text colour. The application derives the cards, the lines, the muted greys and the hover states from those two, in the same code that builds the shipped themes, and it corrects the pair if it would not read. A brand palette becomes a working theme in under a minute.

Accent

Twenty five colours, each shipped as three values

The vivid one for a line or a bar. A deeper one that white text can sit on and still be read. A deeper one again for text on a pale surface. They are not interchangeable, and an earlier version used the wrong one on the primary button, at a contrast of 3.36 against a required 4.5. Or type any hex colour, and it is darkened and shifted until it passes.

Type

Eleven typefaces, a size, a line height and a letter spacing

Inter ships with the application. Grotesque, geometric, humanist, rounded, two serifs, a slab, a monospace and an easier reading face are typefaces already on your machine, so nothing waits on a download. Text size runs from twelve to twenty two pixels and everything scales from it, including the axis labels on the charts. Figures can be set in monospace so a column of them lines up by place value.

Surface

Density, corners, cards and the wallpaper behind them

Roomy, normal or compact, applied to every card, table and field at once. Corners soft, normal or square. Cards flat, outlined, elevated or glass. Behind them, a plain page or one of seven wallpapers drawn by the browser: the living field, a few dozen points drifting and joining that the pointer pushes aside; grain, grid, dots, mesh, aurora, lines. None of it costs a download and the field stops under reduced motion.

Charts and layout

Line weight, a palette that does not rely on hue, and where the sidebar sits

Chart lines fine, normal or bold. Safe for colour vision keeps every pair of series apart without depending on red against green; print friendly puts them in greys. Every chart reads five colour variables, so the setting recolours all of them without a single chart knowing it happened. The sidebar can be full, narrow or hidden, on the left or the right.

Reading

Seven settings for how the page reads, none of them cosmetic

01Motion

Full, reduced, none, or whatever your system says

If your operating system asks for reduced motion, that wins and this setting cannot override it upward. Reduced keeps the count up on a figure, because watching a number arrive is what tells you the screen changed, and drops the stagger, which is decoration.

02Speed

Slow, normal or fast

One multiplier on every transition in the application. Fast is for the person who already knows where everything is.

03Contrast

Stronger contrast, on top of any theme

Pushes every text colour further from its background than the theme already does. It stacks with the two high contrast themes rather than replacing them.

04Links

Underline every link

For anyone who cannot rely on colour to tell a link from the text around it.

05Focus

A heavier focus ring

The ring that follows the keyboard, made thick enough to find on a busy screen.

06Figures

Line numbers up in columns

Tabular digits everywhere, so a column of figures reads by place value rather than by eye.

07Measure

Narrow, normal or wide lines of text

How long a line of prose runs before it wraps. A brief reads differently at sixty characters than at ninety.

Numbers

A figure should be written the way you write figures

Thousands separated with a comma, a point or a space. Large figures shortened to 1.2M or spelled out as 1,200,000. Currency as a symbol, as a three letter code, or left off entirely when every number on the screen is in the same currency anyway. Percentages with none, one or two decimal places, because a band of plus or minus twelve percent does not need two and some people want them regardless. Dates in whichever of the four orders you read without thinking, the clock in twelve or twenty four hours, and the week starting on Monday or Sunday.

The point is not preference. It is that a brief you send to a board should not have to be retyped, and a figure you read quickly should not have to be parsed.

These settings reach the axis labels on the charts as well, so a chart reads the same way as the table beside it.

How it works

Eleven settings that change what the software does, not how it looks

Defaults

What a new scenario starts from

The horizon, the number of replications, and whether the executives react by default. If you always run thirty six months at four hundred replications, set it once. Your plan still caps both.

The lead figure

Which number goes at the top

Operating profit, revenue, cash, customers or margin. It reorders a brief and a comparison so the figure you are accountable for is the first one on the screen. The other four are still there: a preference about what matters most should never take a chart away, because somebody will decide on a chart that was never drawn.

Origins and traces

Chips beside every figure, and the trace open by default

Where a number came from is the product, so the origin chips are on by default. Turning them off quietens the screens and puts the sourcing one click further away. It never empties the assumption ledger's own Source column, because a table that leaves its own column blank is a table that lies. A second switch opens the reasoning trace under every answer without a click.

Landing

Which screen a twin opens on

The overview, the analysis layer, scenarios, what to upload, or wherever you last were. Most people want the last one and nobody thinks to ask for it.

Confirmations and notices

Ask before deleting, and say when a background job lands

A twin, a source, a scenario and a sweep all ask before they go. Turning it off removes the question and nothing else: the deletion still cannot be undone. A sweep or a training run takes minutes, which is long enough to go and do something else, so a line appears when one finishes rather than the screen quietly changing while nobody is looking.

Drafts and keys

Autosaved drafts, and the single key layer

A scenario half set up survives a closed tab. The single key shortcuts for the screens can be switched off in one place if they get in the way of typing. The command palette cannot, because it needs a modifier and can never fire by accident.

Keyboard

Everything the software can do, in one list you can type at

Control K, or Command K. Every screen, every twin you have, every scenario you have set up and every setting, in one list that narrows on letters in order, so three characters usually gets you there. Enter runs it.

Beyond that there are single key shortcuts for the screens, a slash that jumps to the question box on whatever screen you are on, a question mark for the list of them, and Escape, which closes whatever is on top. G then a letter goes straight to a screen: G O for the overview, G U for what to upload, G A for the analysis layer, G D for the decision register, G I for the monitor, G T for the stress test, G F for the alerts, G Y for the proposals, G P for the portfolio.

The list is built fresh each time it opens, from what this account can do, so it never offers something your plan does not include.

Accessibility

What is measured, rather than intended

01
Every text pair, in every theme
The build generates the twenty six themes and refuses any text pair under the standard before the stylesheet is written. Then the test suite opens the application in each of them, walks the screens that between them carry every kind of element the product draws, opens a drawer over the top, reads the computed colour of every piece of text and the surface behind it, and fails on anything under the floor.
02
Every page of this site, in both themes
Every page, at desktop and phone width, in light and dark, each load measured the same way. A dark theme is not a filter over a light one, so a pair that passes in one says nothing about the other.
03
Motion you did not ask for
Everything that moves is additive. With the script blocked, with motion reduced at the operating system, or with the motion setting off, the same page is there and every word of it is readable. No content is ever hidden behind an animation that might not run.
04
Keyboard and focus
Every control is reachable, the focus ring can be made heavier in one setting, and changing a setting puts focus back where it was rather than returning you to the top of the page, which is what it did until it was measured.

No setting on that screen changes a number, widens a band, or alters what the model believes. The theme does not make a forecast more confident and the density does not make it more accurate. If you want to change what the software believes, that is the assumption ledger, and every change there is recorded with your name on it.

The parts that do change the answer

How it shows its workingEvery number back to a quoted line in a file you uploaded.The analysis layerA complex question taken apart, run, reconciled and written up.What it can and cannot tell youThe honest limits, written down before you pay for anything.

Build a twin and set it up the way you work

The free tier takes real files and the settings are all there on it.

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