As a "single source of truth", Drum provides the most value when it's set up correctly with the key details of your business. The following should be set nice and early in your Drum journey:
Billable rates via Rate Cards.
Staff cost rates via their resourcing information.
Staff roles.
Project roles.
Project & Quote templates.
With this information, Drum will provide you with accurate project budgets and profitability figures. It will also allow you to streamline your internal processes by setting up once and leveraging those templates and settings over and over again.
💡Too busy to set up your Drum account or simply want an expert to guide you through the process? The Drum team is here to help with our on-boarding package.
Contact the team to learn more about how this package could help you accelerate your Drum journey.
Drum does provide some defaults for each new account when you chose your "industry" during the registration process. These can be helpful while you're simply trialing Drum, but they can all be removed or adjusted as required for your unique use-case.
💡The settings below require a Drum "admin" account or a "member' level account that has very broad permissions. These settings are important and should only be accessed by key staff.
Drum Settings
To streamline the process of setting up your Drum account, the settings all live in the same place, accessible by clicking on your profile picture or initials at the top-right of all Drum screens.
You'll be taken to the settings area of Drum after clicking on the above and will see the "Company Templates" option by default.
Drum is extremely customisable, so we highly recommend having a quick look at all of these items at the very least. In this guide, we'll go over the most important.
Staff Roles
Towards the top of the "Fundamental Data" area of the Drum settings, you'll see a "Staff Roles/Resource Types" option.
This area allows you to set the billable roles for your business. These billable roles can then be assigned to your staff (or contractors) as their "default" billable role or as potential billable roles (non-default).
These staff roles will appear in your rate card settings.
✅ Your Action Step: Add your billable roles to the "Staff Roles" area of Drum.
Don't be afraid to delete or update the default roles that you may see on your account.
Rate Cards
Rate cards allow you to track different groups of billable rates for your client projects.
Each rate card is made of a rate per staff role (that we set up above) and optionally, a rate per individual staff member.
We highly recommend assigning billable rates at the role level, rather than at the individual level to simplify management, but if it makes sense for your unique case to assign at the individual level, feel free to do so.
You Drum account can have a single default rate card that will be automatically assigned to new projects, but these can be overwritten on a project-by-project basis as required.
Although we won't cover it in this guide, Drum allows you to have custom rate cards per project in case it doesn't make sense to refer to a default for any reason.
✅ Your Action Step: Create a new rate card and set it as "active" and as your default. Add all of your standard billable rates to each staff role shown within the rate card.
Ensure that you only do this after you've created your staff roles above.
Business Overheads
Drum allows you to track "business overheads" for the sake of tracking non-billable time. Common business overheads are things like:
Team meetings
Non-billable administration
IT
Training
Marketing
It's out of scope of this guide, but you can also assign "internal projects" to your business overheads. These projects will also be treated as non-billable for all time allocated to them.
✅ Your Action Step: Create the billable overheads that you'd like your staff to be able to track their time against within your Drum account.
Cost Types
Cost types in Drum are simply ways of categorising the expenses that can be tracked against projects. If the defaults aren't enough for your use-case, please update them now.
✅ Your Action Step: Optionally adjust or add new cost types for your Drum account. You'll be able to select one of these cost types when you allocate an expense to a project.
Project Roles
Project roles in Drum allow you to customise the key internal stakeholders of your projects. Common roles used by other Drum customers are:
Project Manager
Project Director
I'd recommend no more than 3-4 project roles in your Drum account. Think you need more? Send us a message in the live-chat and we'll let you know if you're on the right track.
✅ Your Action Step: Optionally adjust or add new project roles in your Drum account. You'll be able to nominate staff for each project role when you create new projects or when viewing your existing projects.
Staff Details
The last key piece of data for your new Drum account is setting the role and "cost" details of each of your staff members.
This is the only item that isn't accessible in the settings area of Drum and is instead accessed via the drop-down menu to the left of the global search and live-time tracker:
The resources area of Drum allows you to track both human resources and equipment or vehicles (if helpful). For the sake of your staff, you want to set a few key concepts.
First, find a staff member in the list and click on their name.
The key information for each staff member can be found in the first column of the page that follows:
The most important items here are:
Cost Rate
Default Billable Role
Associated Drum Account
Once those items are set, the staff member's time will be accurately recorded and Drum will know the correct billable rate (and cost rate) to use for all time entries.
💡 Cost Rate Recommendation: We'd recommend using a "burden rate" for the cost rate of staff. That's their salary or estimated wage plus any allowances, overheads or additional expenses that should be allowed for.
This allows for easier tracking of gross profit within Drum itself!
💡 Default Billable Role: When this staff member is adding time to projects from anywhere in Drum, the default role is what will be selected automatically. This is also how Drum knows what billable rate to apply against this staff member's time entries.
✅ Your Action Step: Optionally adjust or add new project roles in your Drum account. You'll be able to nominate staff for each project role when you create new projects or when viewing your existing projects.
What's Next?
This information is enough for time entries against project to be accurate and to create a very solid start with your new Drum account.
To finalise your Drum setup, we'd recommend:
Not sure what to do next or if your account looks good? Simply message us and we'll be more than happy to help.