READY FOR REVIEW

# Some Things to Think about before Getting Started

Human Essentials is designed to help you manage your inventory and your relationship with partners, while also providing at least some information to help with your grant writing.

Some questions that will help you when you are setting up Human Essentials.  This is not a complete list.

- Do you (your bank) want to start out immediately with my partners making requests, or do you want to just track your distributions for awhile first?
- Do you run on a monthly cycle, or more on an adhoc basis?
- What information do you need from our partners (see [Partner Profile](pm_partner_profiles.md) for what you *can* collect in the system - this is somewhat configurable)?
  - Do you need to get all that information from your partners before they can enter requests? 
- Do you have different groups of partners allowed to request different items? (if so, you'll want to look at [Partner Groups](pm_))
- Who should have admin access?  (See [Access Levels](getting_started_access_levels.md))
- Do you repackage items into 'kits'? (common for period-focused banks)
- How do you want your partners requesting from you?  (By # of individuals for each item, by quantity of each item, or by specific child (we don't recommend that unless they really have the need.) This is covered more in ["The Request Distribution Cycle"](pm_request_distribution_cycle.md))
  - If quantity, do you want to have our partners request in # of items, or in some other units (e.g. packs, for diapers )

[Prior: Support](intro_ii.md) [Next: Storage Locations](getting_started_storage_locations.md)

