Getting started and signing up
Create your PIToolkit account: what you need, what signup does with your password, the recovery key step, and setting up your workspace.
On this page
You don’t need to understand encryption to use PIToolkit. You need to get through signup and one important step, your recovery key, once. After that it’s a day-to-day case management tool.
Before you sign up
You’ll need:
- An email address you can access. It’s how you sign in.
- A strong password of at least 12 characters. A password manager helps.
- A few uninterrupted minutes and a printer or a safe place to write for your recovery key. Don’t do this in a hurry on a phone. See Your recovery kit for why it matters.
- Your PI licence in good standing. You’ll confirm that you hold a valid private investigator licence in every jurisdiction where you operate. PIToolkit doesn’t check this against state registries; you confirm it on your own professional responsibility.
What signup does with your password
When you create your account, your browser, not our servers, turns your password into two separate things: a key that unlocks your data, which stays in your browser, and a separate value used only to confirm it’s you when you sign in. PIToolkit’s servers keep only a scrambled form of that second value, and hold no key that would let anyone read your cases.
Signing up, step by step
1. Create your account
Enter your Email address, Password and Confirm password, tick the licence confirmation and agree to the Terms of Service, then choose Create account.
As you type, a strength meter shows whether your password is strong enough. When you submit, your browser checks the password against a list of passwords known from data breaches, using the Have I Been Pwned service. Only the first five characters of a scrambled (hashed) form of your password are sent, never the password itself. If your password has appeared in a breach, you’ll be asked to choose another. If the check can’t be reached, no account is created; try again in a moment.
2. Save your recovery key
Next, PIToolkit creates a 12-word recovery key in your browser. You can Print it, Download it or Copy words. Then you type back three of the words to prove you’ve saved it.
This step has no skip button. Until you finish it, every sign-in starts there, and your workspace shows a reminder to finish your security setup. You can still open your workspace in the meantime, but until the key is saved, a forgotten password means losing access to your data. See Your recovery kit.
3. Get your workspace ready
Get your workspace ready has two optional steps:
- Make it look like your firm: your business name, logo and brand colour. See Firm branding.
- Set the defaults you work with: your default billing rate, default case type, notifications and time zone.
You can skip either one with Skip to the next step or Skip and go to my workspace. To come back later, use Resume setup on the Finish setting up card on your dashboard. If you’ve dismissed that card, Finish setting up is in your account menu.
After you’re in
Your workspace opens on the dashboard, which shows what needs your attention and your active cases. From there you can create cases, add contacts, upload evidence, track time, write reports and invite clients to your portal.
We also email you a link to confirm your email address, “Verify your email address for PIToolkit”. It works once and expires after 24 hours. You can use your workspace without it, but you can’t send client portal invitations until you’ve opened it. See Verifying your email address.
We recommend turning on two-factor authentication next.