I want to warmly welcome you to your new Drum account, it's an absolute pleasure to have you trialing a platform that we're very proud of.

The goal of Drum is to be the "single source of truth" for professional consulting firms and this guide will give you a very quick understanding of how it achieves that.

If you ever have any questions with regards to this quide (or generally), please use the live chat in the bottom-right of each Drum screen and we'll be there to help you as soon as we can!

To help you understand how Drum can help your business as quickly as possible, let's speed-run the Drum experience from start to finish at a high level.

This will give you a taste of how Drum works at a high level FAST and will also provide context for you when you're customising your Drum account for your use-case.

In this 30m tour of Drum, we're going to:

After this short preview, you can customise your Drum account with:

Let's start the tour!

Let's first see how Drum helps you keep track of your sales pipeline.

Click on the "Opportunities" navigation option (or navigate directly there by clicking on this link: https://app.getdrum.com/opportunities).

This will show you a list of your "active" sales opportunities and gives you high-level details of these opportunities at a glance.

If you're following this guide with a fresh Drum account, you'll see a single opportunity similar to the below screenshot.

Let's review the sales opportunity in Drum that was created when you created your account.

Make sure you're on the main Opportunities dashboard and click on the first item that appears in the table.

A sales opportunity in Drum has the following key concepts:

Let's change some of these fields now.

On the opportunity page, scroll down until you see the "Deal Value" heading and click on the $0.00 value to change the amount.

Change the value to something that better matches your project values and click on the blue tick to save.

The opportunity page will update with the estimated defal value.

Follow the above steps again to change the "Lead Score" value for the opportunity that appears directly under the "Deal Value" field that you changed above.

It's also simple to manage the tasks within an opportunity in your Drum account!

Click on the coloured status of any task that appears within your opportunity and change the status of that task by selecting a different option in the drop-down list that appears.

You can also change the status of a whole deliverable (the group that all tasks are "within") by clicking on the coloured status name of a deliverable and changing it's value.

Add a new task to one of your existing deliverables on your opportunity by clicking on the plus icon that appears in the last column of the task headings.

Now that we understand the basics of managing a sales opportunity in Drum, let's price out the potential project and create an associated proposal for us to send to the prospect.

On the horizontal navigation bar in your Drum account, click on the "Proposals" option.

Then click on the "Add Proposal" button

You'll now see "template" options to kick-start the proposal process.

Select the first option and click on the "Save" button.

The proposal that you're now presented with is created from the template that you chose during the last step.

This is a very generic, example proposal that new Drum accounts see by default, but you can easily create your own templates to better suit your own needs later.

There are two key concepts within proposals in Drum:

This is the view that you see when you first create a proposal. It has a left-bar with the key details about the proposal and a main area with proposal sections and line items.

The proposal itself is what the prospect will see when you convert the proposal into a Word document.

Think of a proposal as the client-facing portion of this area of Drum.

This is where you price the project in order to understand what to put in the proposal.

This is your internal view where you capture the expected costs (labour and expenses) and create a price as a result.

You can put as much or as little detail into your budget as you would like, the key is to have accurate pricing for the project that will be created as a result of the proposal budget!

To continue, let's add some pricing to our proposal budget (our internal pricing tool).

Click on the "Budget" tab at the top of the proposal screen.

This will take you to the proposal budget, where you will see the proposed project structure broken down by deliverable and task.

Feel free to add estimated hours and "resource types" (roles to complete the work) on the tasks within the budget and you'll see the price of the proposal increase.

While you're here, you can rename or add new tasks or deliverables and delete tasks and deliverables as required.

The structure that you create here will be directly reflected as the project structure if you win this proposal!

Now that you've priced your project (feel free to keep the pricing simple if you want to skip through this guide!), click on the "Proposal" tab to navigate back to the customer-facing proposal.

Now click on the "Sync Budget" button and choose any of the options in the form that appears to convert your internal pricing to line items in your customer-facing proposal!

Select any of the options within (the option shown in the below screenshot keeps things simple).

Click on the "Sync Budget" button and your customer-facing proposal will be adjusted to reflect the pricing that you've created via your budget.

Drum also allows you to download your proposal as a dynamic Word document by clicking on the "Download Word Document" button that appears below your proposal totals.

Click that button now to see your proposal in Word document form.

This will create a Dynamic Word document that includes your customer details, opportunity number, line items, totals and more!

With Drum as your "Single source of truth" you can generate dynamic Word documents like this in many places throughout the platform.

Let's jump back into Drum from the Word document and get ready to convert this proposal into a project.

Once you've sent the proposal to the prospect, you can change the status of the proposal to "Sent", but let's skip a step and change the proposal's status directly to "Accepted" in the first column of the proposal page.

This now allows us to convert this successful proposal to a project that we can allocate time and expenses to and invoice the client for.

We've priced a potential project, sent the proposal and now we've just heard from the imaginary client that they're happy to move ahead.

Let's convert the proposal to a project!

Because we've changed the status of the proposal, we can now see the "Convert to Project" button appear under the proposal totals.

Click that button now.

You'll see a confirmation window appear that helps you to understand what your new project will look like and the associated budget of each deliverable.

Click on the "Convert to Project" button to finalise the process of converting your proposal to a won project.

Drum will forward you through to your newly created project and you'll see a project structure that matches what you created in the previous step.

Much like an opportunity, you can change the values in the first column by clicking on them and you can also manage the project task's statuses, assigning, due dates and more from this screen.

To speed things along, we're going to add a time entry to this project and then create a draft invoice to send to the client (we won't actually send the invoice to anyone!).

You can add time entries to your Drum projects from four different places in Drum:

In this quick walkthough, we're going to simply allocate time to a task from the project page.

First, click on the three vertical dots to the right of a task (ideally one with budget allocation) and click on the top "Add Time" option in the drop-down menu that appears.

You'll see an empty time entry form appear.

Fill in the details for the time entry and click on the save button.

The project's budget will update in real time and you'll be able to see both the project, deliverable and task budgets all update.

You can also view all time entries against a project by clicking on the "Time" tab in the project navigation and viewing the entries within.

We've now allocated time to our new project, let's now send an invoice to the client for this work.

Invoicing in Drum requires a connection to your Xero account.

To connect your Xero account to Drum, click on your initials in the top-right corner of any Drum screen and then select "Integrations".

You'll now see the Drum integrations page, and will need to click on the Xero connection button shown in the image below.

This process will open an authentication wizard in your Xero account where you can optionally select the Xero tenant (account) that you'd like to connect.

Upon completing this process, Drum will display the Xero tenant that has been connected and the associated permissions granted.

Now that you've successfully connected your Xero account to Drum, you can navigate back to your new project to start managing invoices.

To navigate back to your created project, click on the "Projects" option in the top navigation of Drum and click on the project that has non-zero "Costs to date" (the costs are the time that we allocated earlier).

On the project page, you'll now see the "Invoices" option thanks to your connected Xero account.

Click on that invoices tab to navigate to the project invoices page.

From the invoices page click on the "Add Invoice" button.

This opens a form where you can create a helpful initial structure for your invoice. In this example, select the "Proposal" value (or any other value is fine) and ensure that you're capturing the time that you allocated previously in this guide (you may have to change the date ranges, depending on when you added the time entry).

Any time captured against the invoice will be shown under the "Included Times" header.

Click on the "Save and Edit" button to view the newly created invoice.

The invoice page appears and you can see the key details of the invoice in the first column, the invoice itself at the top of the main section and the invoice "inclusions" below.

The invoice line items should be structured in a way that makes sense for the client viewing the invoice, and should include any details required for the client agreement.

The client won't see the time or expense entries allocated to this invoice as this is a way to capture your "work in progress" on the project and to ensure that all billable time is captured against invoices.

There are performance indicators that appear above the main invoice section that inform you of how the invoice values compare to the time and expenses allocated to that invoice. If the numbers are green, that's generally a good sign!

Feel free to adjust the figures on the line items, remove line items, add line items or re-order line items to suit.

Once you're happy with the invoice structure, you can prepare the invoice for integration with Xero.

For an invoice to be valid for Xero integration, it must:

If any of these requirements arent' met, Drum will inform you with an error in the first column upon an integration attempt.

Set those requirements in your example invoice now.

To finalise the invoice integration, change the "Drum Status" to approved and finally, change the "Xero Status" to any of the available options.

Provided that you've met the integration requirements, the invoice will be allocated a unique invoice number from Xero and the connection will be complete.

Drum and Xero now has a two-way connection, where changing values in one system updates the other automatically. Drum is also informed when invoices are paid and will automatically update the invoice status once ready.

Congratulations, you've made it to the end of the 30m guide to Drum!

In this first Drum onboarding guide, you:

To continue exploring your Drum account, we'd suggest:

Additional documentation is being created to further support the onboarding experience for Drum, but if you have any questions in the meantime, please contact us via email or by the live chat system that is shown in the bottom-right of any Drum page.