If you don't know About the Testing Branch of the game yet, it can be accesed from your game's properties menu. simply head over to your libary right click the game and click propeties, then on the beta tab you can click this dropdown to change it to the testing branch. this will update your game to the latest stable version and what we will be talking about mostly in this guide.

This guide basically assumes you know the basics, and covers anything you might have missed or not noticed, aswell as going a bit more indepth into the various systems it has in place incase theirs any one thats confusing you can just jump to that section.

While you are here feel free to join the Software Inc Discord over Here[http//vhttps] where you can chat with other people playing the game and some of the modders in the community aswell as software inc's creator.

Teams are the most important part of any company, they are the groups that get things done around here, so heres a section on some extra tips to make things go a bit smoother.
It generaly works best to seperate off your different skilled people into different groups so that you have a team for artists, a team for designers, a team for coders and one for marketing because then this lets you assign job specif tasks to those people without overburdening them with 10 different tasks.
It also works well to set areas of your company to specific teams, because then for example every room that has an art team in it can have its computers all have art tablets, or marketing can all have phones ect. to do this simply right click a room and use the switch team button. this makes it so only those team members can enter that room so you never get the debuff from other teams distracting your workers.

Another consideration is Leaders, every team should have one and they should get their own office away from the team. why? leaders get an 'own office' buff in their effectiveness if have a space of their own, and holding meetings with the team boosts everyones effectivness more then making up for the time spent sat in a meeting.

Compatability is your friend, when hiring in the new recruits make sure to select the personality option, then you can click compatability at the top and sort by who would actually work well on the team. Teams who work well together boost eachother's effectivness but the opposite is also true, should they hate eachother nothing will get done so this is an important thing to take into consideration when hiring. Usually the more social personalities that make friends easier with other coworkers whereas independant workers struggle to get on with anyone else. a mean/cocky misanthropist is the worst combination for teams and will literally only work on their own slowing down everybody's progress.



For most players teams go home at night and their company sits idle till the next day, theirs that handy skip button to skip over to the next day BUT why? the office is sat there doing nothing still costing rent and bills during the night (just a bit less electricity because lights are off) so why not monopolise on the space that you do have since have to pay for it. by setting up 3 different 8 hour shifts of teams A,B,C shifts you can have the offices open 24/7 and make the same building hold 3 times as many workers meaning triple the profits.
Here you can see how i have each of my 4 departments 3 times, split off into an Alpha, Beta, Charlie shift system. Each shift gets 8 hours in the building and leave as the other one starts, and each shift's vacation days is different so not everyone goes off at once. doing this means support tickets can be seen to around the clock instead of building up overnight, Hyping a product with a marketing team keeps it constantly topped up, and you can design/develop software around the clock so its ready sooner then other companies. the only thing you need to take into consideration is there can be a bit of overlap when one team leaves and the other enters the office causing the popup of 'too many teams in room' but its not actually doing anything because they are literally just leaving its just an anoying popup at each shift change, shortening their shifts to 7 hours can fix this or making individual offices for each member or more secure cubicles.

In the Team settings there is the HR options button (scroll to the right if you cant see it) which, when used properly will allow your teams to automaticly hire and fire staff, keep them trained up and handle wage negotiations for you.
In order to actually be able to enable it your team first needs a employee in the leader role, and that employee needs to be sent off for HR management education which costs £6000 and lasts 3 months, as soon as they are back it can be enabled, but you can still mess with its setting before you enable it.

I'll do a quick overview of what each of the options on the menu actually mean.

• Salaries - What the current team is being paid at this moment
  
• Budget - The upper limit that they can use to hire people, if this isnt enough for the staff you tell him to hire you will get a notification requesting more funds.
  
• Manage Wages - adverages out the wages of people he hires according to the budget, if smaller budget for example would hire less skilled workers that he can pay less so remains under the limit
  
• Manage Complaints - When people bug you for raises they will bug him instead, he will accept or deny depending on how much is left in the budget.
  
• Force role - If Ticked will make programmers you hire actually have the role programmer ect for each the role, if unticked everyone hired will be any role but still have the skillset in the fields you specified.
  
• Staff roles - These 4 boxes are where you input how many of each role you want on your team, remember that the leader is part of the team aswell hence why this one says 49 so that the team makes an even 50 members (if you are small company do not set it that high xD) People hired will have skills that cater to that role but if force role is off can still do and learn up the other ones just wont be trained or specilised in them.
  
• Prefered Age - By Default this is 35, and you can just leave it there. the age of a worker does have a lot of effect on the skills they have, younger people below 30 don't have much of any skill but because they are young can expect them to stay around working for you for a long time, at around the 40-50 mark they specilise in different areas so are really good at 2D or System ect but people that age would be useless at marketing, and 50+ people tend to have a higher overall skill, not many specilisations and might end up retiring sooner due to their advanced age. depending on the kind of team you have this can be slid along to change the prefered age for new hires.
  
• Education - Quite simply how useless or good at the specilisations you want your team to be, set this to max i have no idea why you would want anything else, aslong as their is budget left over he will send off current employees to be educated occasionaly, and any new hires he will try to hire ones that know more of the skills.
  
• Education cooldown - If you don't want your employees constantly out being educated you can put a number in here which is in how many months to wait between educating a person again (i havent been able to test so not sure if this is different for playthroughs with more days per month) this cooldown works for each individual employee.

WIP

WIP

WIP
Untill i write out this section theirs a video here someone did :P

Depending on what year you are playing on server farms can be a very costly venture, as the years go on better versions come out which mean you don't need as many reducing the size of the space you need for them.as you can see on this image here the later servers are much more compact, each of these were made to support 50Gbps, except on the left with medium servers only managed to get to 25Gbps, the fact i didnt have enough room to even show small servers shows how little they can carry and the sheer size of the rooms you will need if you wish to go down the server farm route.

That being said Don't have too large a server you have to pay a constant 'internet' bill based on your max capacity of the server so while having enough to handle the processes is good having loads extra is just throwing money out the window, only build servers as and when you need them.
Its normally a good idea to just build one Master server with every single thing linked to it and every process going towards it instead of having multiple smaller ones, but i recommend a small backup server incase it reaches its limit because then it gives you time to build more servers if the demand increases.

As to how to actually get processes making you money on your servers there are two ways;
You Can set up your own online distributer (essentially what steam itself is) to sell other companies's products for them in exchange for a %cut of the revenue, this is a VERY profitable thing to do if exploited because they are doing all the work and you can take even up to 25% of their profits.
As you can see here in the all companies menu you can see which ones are using your channel, and reach out to them each to negotiate a percentage cut. the other company will ALWAYS lowballl you with a default offer so set a higher one and click okey, if they don't accept you just have to wait till next month to try again. the larger the company the less of a cut they will want to give you so try approaching the companies when they are just starting out and will payoff when they hit big.
As a rule of thumb i go by this but feel free to experiment and see what offers you can get;

• bIg companies that ask for 1-3% just say 5%
  
• between 5-10 up it to 20%
  
• over 10 say 25%
  
• over 15 risk 30%

But Remember that the more companies selling through our servers and the more products they sell the higher the draw on them, so will need a very large server to keep up with demand.

As mentioned earlier in The deals section you can get guests from other companies asking to use your servers to host their software on, with these deals you get paid per MB/s used so the more popular their product is the more demand on your servers and more money it will bring in, if you also accept marketing or support deals for that product you can help boost its popularity yourself scoring you extra cash. When a company hosting on your server makes a sequal they will return to you again to ask to host it, unless you have had issues keeping up with the requirments of hosting it, and in a few years their old product will slow in demand and disappear off your servers as it gets forgotten.

WIP

The game contains a fairly hidden blueprint system that allows you to copy paste buildings, move them or even import buildings other players have designed on the steam workshop into your game.
but the best way to use is, is for building skycrapers :D i'll do a overview of how to do so here with lots of pictures showing where the keys are since not all of them are imediatly obvious. This is the Blueprint menu, only accessable from the build sectiong this gem lets you save and build any rooms you have saved, also if you have subscribed to any buidlings on the workshop they will show on this list with all their info about the cost and such here.

One way this is useful is for constructing vast towers without a lot of hassle, like in this image below i've got a nice floor designed with a tonn of furniture in it and plenty of rooms, i don't want to have to rebuild and refunish each room every time i make a new floor on my building. so by right clicking one of the rooms, selecting the whole floor (or using control and click to select the areas you are wanting to duplicate if its part of a complex) i can then go to the build menu and save it as a blueprint on the menu, in this case this is Tower Mid tier as you can see on the list so i know what blueprint is what.

Once you have done that simply click the blueprint you want and click build, go up one floor and place it ontop of your tower, you can build as many floors as you would like (up to the limit) without having to place each individual item this way.
All these additional floors were built in less then a minute just using shift to place multiple you can also use ',' and '.' to rotate the blueprint if needed.

Theirs a tonn of extra stuff we don't need to go into detail about but are extra little hints that help your business work better, or just cool features you might not have noticed.

• Theirs Actual exchange rates in this game, if you are playing on a currancy other then dollars the prices of everything will differ based on the exchange rate. so if trying to show off your company to a friend remember that the exchange rates exist.
  
• You can right click items like Computers and their acessories and on the wheel there is a 'replace' option this lets you change out a calculator to an artist tablet if you need to or update people's computers, if you click the bottom one it selects every furniture of that type in the room so you can easily update all of the computers when new ones come out.
  
• You pay rent per Square Meter of your building, so wherever you can try to make it as compact as it needs to be, using the half grid size key on the build menu multiple times lets you make tiny adjustments to where furniture and cubiles slot into together to monopolise on space.
  
• Lighting, you don't need It. people only need lights to see in their actual offices where they work other areas like bathrooms and hallways adding lights is just extra electricity cost, stick to cleverly placed windows.
  
• Central Heating and AC units are the way to go when it comes to controling the temp of your buildings, just make sure they are in rooms where the noize/enviroment debuffs wont affect workers. AC units work well in bathrooms since people don't spend much time there, and i usually make a 'boiler room' of sorts in the basement.
  
• Make one building, if you are using AC and Central heating stick to one big building, or connect it together with bridges this way the benifit is shared across the entire thing.
  
• Fancy cars?? your employees will upgrade their ride to one of the sporty cars if their salary is over $5000 a month
  
• There is a photobooth on the main menu, at the top of the menu there is a save picture key underneith the save selector, clicking this takes you to this photobooth section that lets you take a picture of the model of your company. Background Colour, reflectiiveness and lighting can be changed aswell as the image's resolution.