Finding your way around The Taurus
Once you have created your account and logged in, you will see the main interface of The Taurus. This article gives you a quick tour of every major section so you know where to find things.
Top navigation
The header bar appears on every page and gives you access to the most common actions:
- Create Notice — Start a new transparency notice from anywhere on the platform.
- Check Notice — Look up an existing transparency notice by its public ID to verify its status.
- Help — Access the help center (where you are reading this now).
- Pricing — View plan details and feature comparison.
- Language toggle — Switch between English and German (EN/DE) at any time. The toggle is in the header.
- Organisation selector — If you belong to multiple organisations, use this to switch between them. The selected organisation determines which notices and settings you see.
Dashboard
The dashboard is your home screen. It provides an at-a-glance summary of your current situation:
- Notice counts — How many notices you have in each status: drafts in progress, published and live, and archived.
- Linked organisations — Which organisations you belong to and your role in each.
- Quick actions — Shortcuts to create a new notice, view your notices, or manage your organisation.
The dashboard is designed to give you the information you need to decide what to do next, without overwhelming you with details.
My Notices
The notices page shows all transparency notice drafts and published notices associated with your current organisation. You can:
- Filter by status — Draft, Listed, Published, or Archived. Use these filters to quickly find what you are looking for.
- Search — Find notices by their public ID or description text.
- Open a notice — Click on any notice to view its details, edit it in the wizard, or download its QR code.
Each notice in the list shows its current status, creation date, and a brief summary so you can identify it at a glance.
Organizations
Organisations are team workspaces where multiple people can create and manage transparency notices together. This is essential for parties, campaign teams, and agencies that need shared access.
Every account starts with a personal organisation. You can create additional organisations and invite members. There are three roles:
- Owner — Full control, including managing members and deleting the organisation.
- Editor — Can create, edit, and publish notices, but cannot manage members.
- Viewer — Read-only access to notices and organisation data.
You switch between organisations using the organisation selector in the header.
Chapters
Chapters are designed for political parties and NGOs with local branches. If your organisation has regional or local subdivisions — think a national party with state and municipal chapters — you can set up chapters within your organisation.
The key benefit: chapters can define sponsor defaults that automatically pre-fill the sponsor information when creating a new notice. This saves time and ensures consistency. A local chapter creating a notice for a municipal campaign gets the correct local sponsor details filled in automatically.
Publishers
The publishers section is for newspapers, broadcasters, online platforms, and other entities that publish political advertisements. If you are a publisher, this is where you:
- Track your advertisers — See which advertisers are linked to your publisher account.
- Manage ad bookings — Keep a record of which ads you have accepted and their transparency notice status.
- Verify compliance — Check at a glance whether each advertiser has a valid, published transparency notice for their ad.
Publishers play a crucial role in the regulation's enforcement chain. The Taurus gives them the tools to fulfil their verification duties without manual back-and-forth with advertisers.
Campaigns
Campaigns let you group multiple transparency notices together. This is useful when a single campaign involves several ads across different channels — a poster, a newspaper ad, and a social media campaign, for example.
By linking notices to a campaign, you can track aggregate costs across all ads in that campaign and maintain a clear overview of your total political advertising activity.
Account Settings
In account settings you can:
- Update your name
- Change your email address
- Change your password
These settings apply to your personal account across all organisations you belong to.
Next steps
Now that you know your way around the platform, you are ready to create your first transparency notice or set up an organisation for your team. The related articles below can guide you through either path.